San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Erosion of our democracy.
When a fragile faith is deliberately weakened, what comes next?
It has been three weeks since many Americans rightfully recognized Joe Biden as president-elect, the next leader of a divided nation facing tremendous health, economic and civic challenges.
The most generous interpretation of this brief window of time is that our democracy and electoral traditions held strong despite immense pressure and efforts from President Donald Trump to subvert the election as he lied about winning, alleged baseless voter fraud, fought to overturn the results in key swing states and even now refuses to concede.
“This is an embarrassment to our country,” Trump said the day after the election, as mail-in votes continued to be counted and the outcome was unclear. “We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.”
But, of course, he did not win. More than 80 million voters, representing 306 Electoral College votes, chose Biden.
Continuing with this generous interpretation of the last three weeks, we can praise federal Judge MatthewW. Brann, a conservative in Pennsylvania, who dismissed a Trump campaign lawsuit that sought to disenfranchise nearly 7 million voters. The president’s lawyers, Brann said in poignant judicial writing, should have been “armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption.” Instead, they offered only “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations.” He likened their case to Frankenstein’s monster, “haphazardly stitched together.” But, of course, the true monster in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” is its creator.
And we can praise Brad Raffensperger and Katie Hobbs, secretaries of state in Georgia and Arizona, who persevered despite threats, and showed heroism in administering fair and credible elections. Just as we can praise members of arcane canvassing boards who have certified results and state lawmakers who did not move to select partisan pro-Trump electors. Under unprecedented pressure, the system held. And perhaps those who harbor doubts about this election’s outcome can find solace in this. Perhaps.
But a more critical and cleareyed interpretation of the last three weeks is that our elections and democracy are maintained by a collective faith in our processes, and that faith has been eroded. If a few officials had taken a different route — choosing to delay certification in key states, allowing baseless lawsuits to linger — or if the election had been closer, this country could have descended into chaos.
A clear-eyed view sees that it is abhorrent to threaten violence against elections officials or pressure them to subvert the vote. That it should be abnormal in American politics for the loser of a presidential election to refuse to concede, especially when the result is so clear. That baseless claims of voter fraud threaten democracy. That when this happened, many Republican leaders either furthered Trump’s baseless claims or met them with profound silence.
“You can reach out to my comms team,” U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, a Republican who represents San Antonio, the Hill Country and Austin, said when asked about Trump’s claims of widespread fraud. “I’ve got to roll.”
To riff off the Broadway hit, “Hamilton,” if you stand for nothing, then what will you fall for?
This is no time to roll. What has occurred should be a jolt to all — Democrat and Republican — that our democracy is fragile, precious and has been weakened, not irredeemably but in ways once hard to imagine in the United States.
“When societies divide into partisan camps with profoundly different worldviews, and when those differences are viewed as existential and irreconcilable, political rivalry can devolve into partisan hatred. Parties come to view each other not as legitimate rivals, but as dangerous enemies. Losing ceases to be an accepted part of the political process and instead becomes a catastrophe,” write political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in their book “How Democracies Die.”
It couldn’t happen here? Of course it could. Several recent polls have shown a majority of Trump voters believe Trump really won the election. At the local level, it’s an outlook crystallized by Bexar County Republican Party Chair John Austin, who recently said, “We want him to win. I just feel like a lot of fishy things happened and are still happening.”
While a transition is at long last formally occurring, we have no sense of the long-standing damage done to our democracy or where this moment will take us. For those Republicans who remain incredulous about the presidential result, even as they accept sweeping GOP wins in other races, just imagine a populist Democrat who refuses to concede and alleges widespread unfounded voter fraud and some state lawmakers mull overturning the will of the people. This is a plea for bipartisan concern.
We focus on winners after elections, but democracies can’t
function if the candidates who lose won’t acknowledge defeat. It’s a point U.S. Sen. John Cornyn made to this Editorial Board in September.
“But I do worry about people (not) accepting the outcome,” he said. “That’s typically when all of our differences get resolved. Where the majority party wins, the minority party is unhappy, but they accept the outcome, and that’s the way it should be.”
In that meeting, which played some role in our recommendation that Cornyn be re-elected, he expressed deep concern about our democracy and a loss of collective confidence.
“I think it’s a mistake to say there will not be a peaceful transition of power or that there is any doubt about it,” he said at the time.
We asked if Biden could win the election without it being “rigged.”
“Absolutely,” he said.
But these statements were made before the election. Cornyn’s comments after the election have been more constrained and slower to develop. It was only on Monday that Cornyn most fully acknowledged Biden’s victory, telling the Austin American-Statesman, “I fully expect that unless there is some surprise that none of us know anything about right now, Joe Biden will be the next president.”
Of these frivolous legal challenges, he said, “I think it is important to make sure that the people who did vote for President Trump feel like the election was fair and that he had an opportunity to make his case.”
Let’s pause over this statement. Yes, the president has a right to make his case, but that case has proven to be baseless. His legal challenges have been anti-democratic as they sought to invalidate millions of votes and deny Biden’s administration legitimacy. Why should such a corrosive process — one that threatens democracy — be necessary for the president’s supporters to have confidence in democracy?
The arguments against acknowledging Biden’s victory have been flaccid. A common refrain was such a judgment cannot be rendered until the votes are formally certified.
Again, here is Cornyn, during a Nov. 19 call with reporters: “He is not president-elect until the votes are certified. So the answer to that is no, and I don’t know what basis you or anybody would claim that he’s president-elect before the votes are certified and these contests resolved.”
One obvious basis would be precedent. For example, in 2016 Cornyn issued a statement the day after the election — Nov. 9 — recognizing Trump as the next president.
“I want to congratulate President-elect Trump on his remarkable victory,” it begins.
We have also heard frequent comparisons with Florida in 2000, when it took 37 days to determine a winner between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore. It’s an argument U.S. Rep.-elect Tony Gonzales, who will represent parts of San Antonio, advanced during an Editorial Board meeting Monday.
It’s an absurd comparison. The election hinged on one state, decided by 537 votes. Importantly, it was an outcome Gore accepted.
In contrast, Biden won Arizona by more than 10,000 votes, Georgia by more than 12,000 votes, Michigan by more than 154,000 votes and Pennsylvania by more than 81,000 votes.
But there is one connection to Florida in 2000 that is salient to 2020. The delayed transition from President Bill Clinton to President-elect Bush weakened national security. As the 9/11 Commission Report would later note, “The loss of time hampered the new administration in identifying, recruiting and obtaining Senate confirmation of key appointees” in advance of Sept. 11, 2001.
And so it goes, continuing to an argument that Democrats rejected Trump in 2016, so why should Republicans accept Biden as president? And while it’s true Democrats were quick to unfurl their “resist” banners (although Trump offers much to resist), it’s also true that Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote, conceded. Just as it is true that President Barack Obama assisted Trump with the transition of power.
In his 1922 book “Public Opinion,” journalistWalter Lippman writes that it is media, imperfect as it may be, that mostly distills the outside world for us. The observation being that few of us will travel to a war zone or attend a Dallas Cowboys game, so we rely on media to create the “pictures in our head.” But if reporting is inaccurate or, more dangerously, we rely on distorted alternative sources of propaganda, then those pictures become warped and there is no agreement of fact.
As Lippman writes, “For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities, and that in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond.”
Lippman was writing a century ago, but his words remain relevant in a media landscape where social media platforms are dominant and ripe for manipulation, often with the intent of stoking division. These are platforms, untethered to the standards of journalism, that are used to create pictures in our heads, including false ones.
“This Election was RIGGED, but we will WIN!” Trump tweeted Wednesday.
Many people believe this. Consider a more subtle manipulation: In 2016, Russian Facebook ads set up dueling rallies outside the Islamic Da’wah Center of Houston. One group promoted secession and held a rally dubbed “Stop Islamification of Texas.” The other group rallied under “Save Islamic Knowledge.” The rallies occurred at the same time and at the same place. Unknowing Americans fought with each other.
Perhaps this seems outlandish, the stuff for easy marks in a heated political year. But it demonstrates how something fake can exacerbate real division. Besides, there is a good chance you have been manipulated online, too.
“You might think you’ve never interacted with a fake person online, but you have, and with loads of them,” Jaron Lanier writes in “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.”
“You decided to buy something because it had a lot of good reviews, but many of those reviews were from artificial people. You found a doctor by using a search engine, but the reason that doctor showed up high in the search results was a load of fake people linked to her office. You looked at a video or read a story because so many other people had, but most of them were fake. You became aware of tweets because they were retweeted first by armies of bots.”
It’s a landscape in which falsehoods are amplified, fake people seem real and losers can declare themselves winners.
Biden will be the next president not because of widespread voter fraud, but because he won and the system held. But what do the last three weeks portend for our nation’s future?