The phantom Election Day menace

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With Election Day looming, the air is thick with dire hypotheticals and nightmare scenarios. Would Donald Trump acknowledge defeat at the hands of Joe Biden? Would a disputed election land in the courts, or the House of Representatives? Will foreign powers interfere with the balloting—or will violence break out in tense swing-state districts? Can the media, or the overstrained U.S. Postal Service, manage the intricacies of mail-in balloting during the Covid-19 pandemic?

Amid all this justifiable anxiety over the stability and viability of America’s notoriously buggy and ad hoc electoral system, at least one pundit has stepped forth to pronounce that the real threat is getting short shrift: Brookings scholar Shadi Hamid argues in an essay for The Atlantic that disenchanted liberals and Democrats may repudiate the American electoral process should Donald Trump again win the presidency. Hamid’s case boils down to the complaint that Democrats, having failed to gain power in the state legislatures and statehouses that oversee the conduct of elections and the drawing of new congressional districts, will rise up against another GOP capture of the White House that didn’t rest on a majority of the popular vote, and denounce the system as irredeemably corrupt.

In the wised-up cadence of pundit gamesmanship, Hamid insists that Republican campaign operatives are simply enjoying the spoils of victory when they rig electoral processes and district maps in their favor. What’s more, he contends, the appearance of another unfair outcome, hinging on another Trump victory in the Electoral College, might spark a wave of protests from the left that could dwarf this summer’s historic demonstrations against police violence, and plunge the country into a whole new register of civic chaos. But as New Republic staff writer Matt Ford observes, Hamid’s worries are a willful denial of the long-standing GOP assault on voting rights and fair representation. In the scheme of things that Hamid blindly endorses as inherently democratic, right-wing impunity reigns:

Closed polling places in Black neighborhoods and lawmakers who immunize themselves from ordinary electoral consequences are taken as a valid outcome of the democratic process instead of a fundamental corruption of it. The long right-wing campaign to suppress voters to secure power is chalked up to “party discipline” and “how the game is played.” Hamid claims that Obama’s 2008 and 2012 victories show how Democrats can win the presidency “via normal means,” without considering that many Republicans are fighting tooth and nail precisely to prevent that from ever happening again.

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And it’s not as though the consequences of this power grab are somehow being kept under wraps. Trump cronies such as Roger Stone—himself a beneficiary of the GOP’s contempt for the rule of law, thanks to an egregiously unfounded presidential pardon—are openly urging the president to declare martial law if the election is called for Biden. And Trump’s Health and Human Services communications director, Michael Caputo, took to Facebook with a tirade that predicted an armed uprising on the right in the event of a Trump loss in November. (The outburst eventually forced Caputo to announce he was taking a leave.) These Trump apologists, of course, take their rhetorical cues from the president, who constantly delivers evidence-free assaults on the integrity of mail-in voting and alleged Democratic-orchestrated election fraud, while also egging on violent threats within his base. In other words, as Ford explains, concern-trolling commentators such as Hamid are deliberately downplaying an anti-democratic threat that’s hiding in plain sight:

I am … worried that even if things go relatively smoothly in November, some of Trump’s followers will take up arms after the election, either to punish his defeated opponents or to retaliate against them for winning. I fear that even if the overwhelming majority of his supporters don’t carry out acts of political violence, his words may nonetheless inspire another Cesar Sayoc or Christopher Hasson to plot a campaign against his perceived enemies. And if Americans take to the streets to express their opposition to the Trump administration’s policies, I worry that more armed gunmen like the one in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last month will insert themselves into situations with potentially lethal consequences.

It takes some truly dumbfounding powers of disassociation from consensual reality to gaze on the blatantly authoritarian cast of late-stage Trumpist rule and decide that American democracy stands in imminent peril from … disenchanted liberals. To borrow a trope from the horror genre, Hamid and the other terminally complacent members of our pundit caste needs to understand that the call is coming from inside the house.

—Chris Lehmann, editor