We’re almost on the other side. As I write this, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and North Carolina are counting votes.
It definitely wasn’t what we hoped for. A Biden win (which seems highly likely) stops the slide to autocracy. But not winning the Senate puts us in a holding pattern: With a Republican-held Senate and 6-3 Supreme Court, we won’t see much progress. (There remains the slightest chance of the Democrats eeking out a tie in the Senate if both Senate races in Georgia go to a runoff–but it’s highly unlikely.)
Taking the long view, to secure democracy we need to:
- Learn to integrate people inclined toward autocracy into a democracy
- Increase productive civic engagement
- Combat and understand the appeal of disinformation.
We all knew before today how the Election Night episode of the Trump Reality Show would unfold. We knew Trump would declare himself a winner before all the votes were counted. We knew he would then claim that the absentee ballots were fraudulent, and insist that any votes counted after Election Night were fraudulent.
We knew all of this because Trump told us, and because Trump and his Republican supporters—in full view—set the stage for this particular episode. When asked if he would commit to a peaceful transition of power, Trump gave away the plot. He said, “there won’t be a transfer” if we “get rid of the ballots.” Relentlessly, and without evidence, he insisted that absentee ballots are riddled with fraud. Republicans filed lawsuits literally designed to get rid of the ballots. In June, Trump’s ally Louis DeJoy became Postmaster General, despite having no relevant experience. Almost immediately, the mail slowed down, undermining voter confidence in sending ballots through the mail. As the election approached, Trump announced that votes should not be counted after Election Day, and that the winner must be known at midnight November 3.
On Election Day eve Trump and his supporters followed the script. At 9:49 p,m, Trump tweeted that “We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election. We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Polls close.”
Because Trump’s tweet conflated votes counted after Election Day with votes cast after election day, Twitter hid the content of the tweet with the note that “some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or civic process.”
At 12:45 am, when key states were not finished counting their votes, Trump declared himself the winner of the election.
Today, as the counting continued and Trump’s lead in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan shrank, he declared that his leads started disappearing as “surprise ballot dumps” were counted. He tweeted: “They are finding Biden votes all over the place — in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. So bad for our Country! And: “They are working hard to make up 500,000 vote advantage in Pennsylvania disappear — ASAP. Likewise, Michigan and others!” (These Tweets, too, were flagged by Twitter as disputing and possibly misleading.)
Trump said darkly that, “A very sad group of people are trying to disenfranchise” his supporters. On cue, his supporters began rioting outside the counting areas, insisting that the counting stop. Trump’s legal team filed a barrage of silly and frivolous lawsuits.
Trump critics spent much of the past four years believing that if they just put the truth before the American people, Americans—in overwhelming numbers—would reject Trump. That was the principle that guided the impeachment hearing.
As the votes are counted, I’m sure many of us are in shock that more than 64 million Americans voted for Trump even after everything we know about him. The sobering fact is that if Trump hadn’t so badly mishandled the pandemic, he might have been reelected–despite all that law breaking, and evidence that Trump was using the office of the presidency to enrich himself.
It’s time for Trump critics to understand that while some Trump supporters are victims of propaganda, many of them willingly and eagerly embrace the lies.
They like the show. The prefer the myth that Trump offers to facts.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended Trump’s lies by arguing that his lies actually “pointed out a deeper truth.”
To take an example of that, “President Obama was born in Africa,” was a provable lie, but it pointed out what many Trump’s supporters see as a deeper truth: President Barack Obama is black and has a foreign-sounding name, and, therefore, he isn’t really a real American.
Scholars Oliver Hahl, Minjae Kim, and Ezra W. Zickerman Sivan, in “The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue,” seek to explain why Trump’s followers eagerly accept provable lies. They argue that those who want to destroy the “political establishment” willingly embrace a liar because they understand that the lies themselves destroy.
Hannah Arendt, in the Origins of Totalitarianism, said something similar:
Some embrace lies because they are comforting. American history is riddled with myths. The plantation system was based on the lie of white supremacy. The frontier was based on the cowboy myth: A [white] man worked hard, was self-reliant, “tamed” the “savage” land, and didn’t need government help. (Heather Cox Richardson) Myths are appealing. They make us seem larger than we are.
Another way of seeing this is through the lens of sociology. Sociologist Max Weber, in Politics as Vocation, outlined three sources of authority for government:
- Traditional (the authority underlying monarchies)
- Legal-rational/rule of law, (the authority underlying democracies), and
- Personal charisma (the source of authority underlying totalitarian and fascist regimes).
The legal-rational, rule of law source of authority depends on facts. In contrast, personal charisma is based on myth. The myth is that the leader embraces the destiny of the nation, that his instincts are superior to the elite scientist. The leader decides what is true. and that his word therefore commands the direction of the nation.
Biden represents legal-rational rule of law. Trump, in contrast, draws his authority from what Weber calls personal charisma. (Today we might say cult leader or demagogue). The hitch is this: To survive, the charismatic leader must obliterate facts, and to survive, rule of law must obliterate myth. These two forms of government are mutually exclusive. Trump must destroy factuality. Rule of law requires a shared factuality, or what sociologists call the public sphere.
The shock for many Trump critics as the votes in the 2020 election is being counted is confronting the fact that so many Americans prefer myth to facts. Facts are troublesome things. Democracy is messy. It requires compromise. Autocracy, in contrast, promises that all obstacles will be swept away and the autocrat will impose order.
The fact that the election was closer than we expected—and that the Republicans will retain control of the Senate even after the Senate voted to acquit Donald Trump in his impeachment hearing—tells us that Trumpism is not going away: It will outlive Donald J. Trump. The white nationalists are not going to slink back into their corner.
Those who prefer rule of law need to understand what motivates those who do not. Those who want to live in a fact-based world, must understand the perennial appeal of myth and lies. The results of the 2020 election shows us that we have much to learn.
We have a lot of work to do before the 2022 elections.
You are taking mental health breaks, right? The days and weeks to come may feel like a roller coaster.
My work on election day stated at 2:30 local time (90 minutes before the polls opened in Georgia). I spent the day in what is called the “boiler room”– a room full of lawyers handling problems coming from the polls (this year the boiler room was on zoom.)
I’ll share the mental health break I took to prepare for Election Day.
Here is the mountain peak as it appears over my backyard fence:
Here I am, about halfway up. JJ was helpful, always on high alert, watching for lizards and rabbits.
Here I am on top of the mountain.
I took a movie of the view from the top with my phone, but couldn’t figure out how to upload it here, so here it is in a Tweet:
I arrived home (7 miles round trip) to the news that the Harris County judge ruled on whether to throw out the 120,000 ballots as requested by four Republicans in that ridiculous lawsuit I told you about.
The judge ruled against the petitioners. He held that the lawsuit was untimely and that the petitioners didn’t have standing. We can expect to see many more Trump lawsuits tossed out of court.
