National Post (National Edition)
We are increasingly anxious that this country is headed toward the worst post-election crisis in a century and a half.
— LETTER FROM FIVE ACADEMICS, LED BY LARRY DIAMOND HOOVER OF THE INSTITUTION, A CONSERVATIVE POLICY THINK-TANK AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY.
As Tuesday's presidential election day dawned in Washington, D.C., a new “non-scalable” fence had been erected around the perimeter of the White House during the night, in anticipation of civil unrest before the day was done.
In parts of the U.S. capital, storefronts were boarded over and federal buildings, such as the Treasury Department, were fenced in. D.C. Police rallied officers and equipment and acknowledged unrest is expected, “regardless of who wins,” said the chief. George Washington University warned students to stock up on a week's worth of food and medicine, as if a hurricane is heading to town.
Perhaps there is.
Plenty of scenes have been playing out in the United States to stoke fears of the improbability of a peaceful postelection America, no matter who wins the presidential vote.
If Trump loses, will he refuse to accept the result and try to remain in office? Will he rally zealous supporters, some of whom are better armed than many nations, to protect him?
If Trump wins, will his zealous detractors take to the streets in protests that inevitably will bring violence and destruction?
Or will all the angst and fear of unrest, or outright insurrection, turn out to be this year's pre-result fantasy, akin to 2016's certainty of Hillary Clinton's victory?
Is America really a nation of well-armed sore losers?
Things — alarming things — are being thought and said out loud about the prospect for a smooth acceptance of the election results, things that sound as if the scene is a fragile, war-torn country rather than one of the world's oldest continuous democracies.
“We are increasingly anxious that this country is headed toward the worst post-election crisis in a century and a half,” says an article penned by five academics, led by Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a conservative policy think tank, drawing from research tracking public opinion trends.
“Our biggest concern is that a disputed presidential election — especially if there are close contests in a few swing states, or if one candidate denounces the legitimacy of the process — could generate violence and bloodshed,” Diamond and colleagues wrote in Politico.
“We do not pull this alarm lightly.”
The International Crisis Group, an independent organization that monitors global violence, often focusing on failing states, issued a report on the United States in the campaign's closing days.
“The ingredients for unrest are present,” the report warns.
The United States faces risks that have doomed other countries: stark political polarization bound to issues of race and identity; the rise of armed groups built around political agendas; and the unusually high chance of a contested election outcome.
“And most importantly,” the report says, “President Donald Trump, whose toxic rhetoric and willingness to court conflict to advance his personal interests have no precedent in modern U.S. history.”
It is an odd place for the United States to be. The Crisis Group understands the apparent cognitive dissonance.
“The country faces an unfamiliar danger. While Americans have grown used to a certain level of rancour in these quadrennial campaigns, they have not in living memory faced the realistic prospect that the incumbent may reject the outcome or that armed violence may result.”
In its final pre-election poll, Gallup found a record high 64 per cent of voters afraid of what will happen if their candidate loses, almost equally by supporters of both Trump and Joe Biden; 77 per cent said stakes are higher in 2020 than in previous elections.
Pew Research Center, in its end-of-campaign polling, found that only half of Trump supporters thought the election would be properly run.
Previous Pew studies found the level of animosity in the United States between Republicans and Democrats was deeper and more personal.
It was described as mutual “loathing”; 55 per cent of Republicans said Democrats are “more immoral” than other Americans and 47 per cent of Democrats said the same about Republicans.
These results suggest that even if this election passes without the nightmare scenarios being conjured, governing the country will be more difficult, jaded and partisan.
Political and social unrest this year was pushed along by a deadly and ruinous pandemic, racial injustice and broad public protests amplified by rallying cries on social media. These events exacerbate the dangerous divide, yet none of them will just evaporate after the election results are tabulated.
“Civil war is here, right now,” declared the leader of a far rightwing militia group after a Trump supporter was killed in Portland, Ore., calling others to rally to his side.
An antifa activist tweeted Tuesday: “The best way to stop a racist with a gun is an anti-racist with a gun. Because they're not gonna stop having guns.”
The unnerving possibilities were laid bare last month when members of a Michigan militia group were arrested and accused of a plot to kidnap Michigan's Democratic Governor, Gretchen Whitmer, overthrow the state government and start a civil war. Is this really all so new?
There was a similar vibe in America during the 1968 presidential election, when Republican candidate Richard Nixon beat incumbent Democratic vice president Hubert Humphrey. There was a third candidate in the race, Alabama governor George Wallace, who championed racial segregation, a measure of the temperature of America at the time.
Civil unrest, protests, riots, polarization and outrageous violence preceded that vote. Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated that April, sparking protests and riots; U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated that June, while he was a strong candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.
At the 1968 Democratic National Convention, large-scale street fighting broke out between anti-Vietnam War protesters and police and the National Guard. Some of the visuals from it look like low-resolution pictures from 2020.
In the wake of that election, a domestic terrorist group formed in Michigan. The Weather Underground started attacking government buildings to protest imperialism and racism. The first thing they blew up was a statue. It all sounds too familiar. America survived. It has survived 44 peaceful transitions from one president to the next through 58 presidential elections.
Has America become significantly more fractured?
Has the last four years changed the country that much?