In a
nutshell, my take on the recent U.S. presidential election is that we came very
close to losing American democracy. It was saved, for the time being, by
election officials and workers in the individual states who did an amazing job
in extraordinarily difficult circumstances. The court system gets credit, too,
but largely because the states presented the judiciary with such clean results.
And the much-maligned Post Office deserves credit for getting huge numbers of pandemic-induced
mail-in ballots delivered on time.
As Donald
Trump’s Attorney General William Barr said, his department found no evidence of
irregularities significant enough to change the outcome.
One can
also view it as a vindication of Federalism and the division of power. Imagine if a single federal agency had been
in charge of carrying out the election and certifying the results.
Trump was
clearly counting on chaos and, indeed, had said as much in the lead-up to the election.
If the vote failed to show him the clear winner, he appeared to believe the outcome
would be messy enough to render the results invalid. Who knows exactly what would have come next,
but I doubt it would have been a peaceful transfer of power in line with the
provisions of the Constitution as we have traditionally understood them. The storming of the Capitol could easily have
been far worse.
To me, the
most astonishing aspect of the election was that Trump got about 10 million more
votes in 2020 than in 2016. One might argue that was because overall turnout
was significantly larger, but despite his appalling behavior, he got half of
the additional votes. And there was no rush by the people who voted for him the
first time – most significantly white Americans, -- to acknowledge a mistake
and sweep him back out. Not at all! And
there was even evidence that Trump had found new pockets of support in
unexpected places.
Having
read a great deal of commentary and analysis on what produced Trump’s 2016
victory, I would say that in broad-brush terms there were two significant
trends: changing demographics signaling the coming end of a dominant white
majority combined with persistent economic stagnation and even decline of much of
the white middle class, and particularly those with less education. Many white
Americans seem to fear they are in danger of sinking below layers of both new,
non-white arrivals and the traditional Black “underclass.” To them, the
presidency of Barak Obama seemed a harbinger of their decline.
Recent
books that help shed light on what is going on include: “Strangers In Their Own
Land,” by Arlie Russell Hochschild; “Brown Is The New White,” by Steve Phillips,
and “Caste,” by Isabel Wilkerson.
Toward the
end of her book, Wilkerson relates a conversation she had with the historian
Taylor Branch, the author of a trilogy on the life of Martin Luther King. She
quotes Branch, who she identifies as a friend, as saying: “People were angry
when the projections (that whites would fall into minority status by 2042) came
out. People said they wouldn’t stand for being a minority in their own
country [my emphasis]. … So the real question would be, if people are given
the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?”
That’s
clearly a concern Wilkerson herself strongly feels. But quoting Branch, who is
white (she is Black), serves to give the notion, which Trumpism clearly
embodies, more force and credibility.
Biden’s victory
was a relief, but the down-ballot outcome was sobering, suggesting significant
problems lie ahead. Democracy, as we have known it, may indeed not be the top
priority of a significant number of Americans in years to come,
