By Rich Lowry
Wednesday,
January 03, 2024
We are
about to embark on what might be one of the wildest years in the history of
American politics, and it may end up merely as a prelude.
If
2024 is set to be tumultuous and unpredictable, just wait until 2025 if Donald
Trump wins the presidency again later this year.
His
adversaries don’t have a history of accepting his victories with equanimity.
Trump’s unexpected victory in 2016 launched conspiracy theories about how Russia had helped him win, catalyzed a yearslong
law-enforcement investigation into him and his campaign based on those
theories, and set off protests in the streets.
All
that was mild, given what may yet be in the offing.
Trump’s
opponents are sincerely, and to some extent understandably, alarmed by his
conduct after the 2020 election and how he’s branded his political comeback as
a revenge tour.
For
most of them, though, saving democracy doesn’t mean upholding the rules no
matter what and letting the voters decide the election and the fate of the next
president. No, it means blocking Donald Trump by any means necessary,
regardless of the consequences for the rule of law, democratic politics, or
faith in our system of government.
In
this view, democracy has only one legitimate outcome, and it doesn’t involve
Donald Trump back at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Some
Democrats deserve minimal credit for distancing themselves from the Colorado
and Maine decisions striking Trump from the ballot and arguing that the right
way to defeat Trump is via the voting booth, although this isn’t much of a
concession.
What’s
already happened has put the country in an unprecedented place. It is hard to
imagine what’s more extreme than one side in our politics indicting its leading
opponent, creating the real prospect of jailing him in the months prior to an
election, and excluding him from the ballot in select states.
Yet,
if Trump wins, we have to assume that this is only a taste of things to come.
It’s not as though his enemies are going to conclude that Trump was an
intolerable threat as a candidate, but once he’s been elected president again,
the voters have spoken and everyone should revert to politics as usual.
The Washington
Post ran a long, much-discussed essay by respected foreign-policy
writer Robert Kagan arguing that Trump has brought the U.S. to the brink of
dictatorship. If he returns to power, it will mean “the price of opposing him
becomes persecution, the loss of property and possibly the loss of freedom.”
This
dire view depends on every institutional bulwark of America’s system — from the
courts to the military to public opinion — surrendering to a one-term president
who, if history is any guide, will get rebuked in the midterms and become a
lame duck by his third year in office.
But
if tyranny is where you think we are headed, what’s the appropriate response?
Running anti-Trump super-PAC ads this year? Canvassing for President Biden?
Going on CNN panels to sound very concerned? In other words, simply all the
standard means of political organization and persuasion?
And
if Trump emerges victorious, and the alleged dictatorship is underway in
earnest?
Certainly,
the reaction will make the pro-Hamas protests that have roiled college campuses
and disrupted transportation nodes around the country look small-scale by
comparison. If the republic is supposedly on the verge of falling, extra-legal
means of resistance are justified.
At
least some portion of the Left will convince itself that only a color
revolution can save the country.
Prior
to the 2016 Trump–Clinton contest, one school of Trump supporters posited that
it was the “Flight 93 election” — possibly the last chance to save the country.
The consequences of failure were so awful that anything was justified to win.
Now, that’s the way the Left feels, except Trump won his Flight 93 election,
and Joe Biden could well lose his.
If
so, there will be much to fear from democracy’s self-styled defenders.
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