By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, November 03, 2020
There is one clear leading indicator pointing to
President Donald Trump still having a chance to win the election — stores
around America are fortifying themselves in anticipation of election-related
violence.
Businesses in cities such as New York City, Washington,
Los Angeles, and Chicago are boarding up as if a Category 5 hurricane were
bearing down.
Everyone tends to be coy about the reason why. The cops
in Beverly Hills worry about “protest activity.” Tiffany & Co. refers to
“potential election-related activity.” Saks Fifth Avenue says it’s taking
precautions “in the event of civil unrest due to the current election.”
This is all very diplomatic, but there’s no doubt about
what has American business on edge, and it isn’t the possibility that the local
women’s Republican club is going to take to the streets if Joe Biden wins in a
landslide. No, the risk is that left-wing rioters are going, as is their wont,
to rampage through America’s cities if Donald Trump wins a second term.
There are certainly malefactors on the right who should be
called out and shunned, and it’s disgraceful that Trump has spent so much time
preparing the ground to argue that he’s been cheated if he loses. Yet the Left
has the numbers, the proven penchant for violence (up to $2 billion of property
damage this year so far), and the intellectual enablers to put parts of America
on crisis footing in anticipation of its possible shock and upset after
November 3.
Trump’s most fervid critics have been expecting a coup
with such certainty that they will treat a Trump electoral victory as if it is
one.
They believe in the moral necessity of accepting the
election result only if it is to their liking and, in the majesty of American
democracy, so long as a president they fear and loathe doesn’t win.
They are sticklers for rules, provided they work in their
favor, and for norms that don’t constrain their own conduct, up to and
including excusing mayhem and property damage.
Everyone knows that the same rioters who have ransacked
businesses in the name of “social justice” for months are coming again if Trump
gets to 270 electoral votes. According to the New York Times, some
stores are using different screws than during the summer to foil looters
equipped with screw guns.
The Times notes a contractor in Colorado who has
bought a two-year supply of plywood for retailers and removed the name of his
business from his trucks for fear of retaliation. Nothing to see here — just
life in America where urban violence has become expected, indeed part of the
social fabric.
It is widely assumed on the center-left that Trump is
going to “steal” the election, by which is meant he will deploy lawyers to file
post–Election Day litigation protecting his interests. Obviously, Joe Biden
will do the same. In such a post-game, Trump is likeliest to succeed where
judges rewrote the election rules in defiance of the U.S. Constitution’s
requirement that state legislatures write them. In such cases, it is the new
rules, not Trump’s prospective challenges of them, that are illegitimate.
Another trope is that Trump can win only via “voter
suppression,” a bizarre charge in an election in which about 100 million people
have voted early and overall turnout is going to smash the 2016 record. The cry
of “voter suppression” is best understood as itself a powerful tool for turning
out voters, rather than a description of an America where there’s unprecedented
voting.
That is to the good. But the election shouldn’t be taking
place under the implicit threat of violence if it goes the “wrong way.” This is
not how a great republic is supposed to work, and perhaps one day there will be
a universal consensus about that again.
For now, though, to paraphrase the old song, it’s praise
the Lord and pass the plywood.
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