True democracy in America is a young, fragile experiment that must be defended if it is to endure.
The Capitol building of the United States was breached yesterday by a mob seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election at a sitting president’s behest. Waving Trump banners and Confederate flags, it forced the evacuation of the building and temporarily delayed the timely ceremonial counting of the electoral votes. The immediate catalyst for the assault on the Capitol was the president himself. After addressing thousands of his supporters who had come to protest the results of the election, Donald Trump called his defeat an “egregious assault on our democracy,” urging the crowd to “walk down to the Capitol. We are going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and -women, and we are probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them. Because you will never take back our country with weakness.” As the insurrectionists stormed the Capitol, the president, who has a keen appreciation for the better part of valor, retreated to the White House to watch the events unfold on television. Trump delights in violence as a flattering tribute to his own greatness—in 2015, after several of his supporters assaulted a homeless Latino man in Boston, he praised them as “very passionate.” After watching the mob ransack the Capitol building from afar, Trump released a video half-heartedly urging his supporters to leave, while reassuring them that they were “very special.” The chaotic scene in Washington was familiar to American history but foreign to many living Americans—an armed mob seeking to nullify an election in the name of freedom and democracy. The violence was a predictable consequence of the president’s talent for manipulating dark currents of American politics he does not fully comprehend. What transpired yesterday was not simply an assault on democracy. It was an attack on multiracial democracy, which is younger than most members of the Senate. Since Trump lost his reelection campaign in November, both he and his supporters across the country have falsely insisted that the election was rigged against him, a claim not one Trump-appointed judge, justice, or federal prosecutor has found a shred of evidence to support. The president has demanded that state legislatures overturn the election results, urged the Supreme Court to reverse the outcome, and attempted to pressure the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, into altering his state’s vote count in Trump’s favor. Trump’s latest scheme was to insist, preposterously, that the vice president has the constitutional authority to choose the winner of a presidential election unilaterally when the electoral votes are counted in Congress. Vice President Mike Pence wisely declined to indulge him. Rather than relieve the president of his delusions, Republican elected officials have engaged in ostentatious displays of devotion to their leader, with a majority of House Republicans voting to overturn the results last night even after the insurrection at the Capitol. A small group of Republican senators, including Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, demanded that Congress reject the election results and instead appoint a commission to examine whether the results should be overturned, on the grounds that many of their own constituents genuinely believe the false allegations of voter fraud that Republican leaders have been telling them are true. Demanding that a candidate who lost the Electoral College and received 7 million fewer votes than his opponent be allowed to remain president may seem a strange turn for a party that has spent the Trump years presenting itself as the vanguard of the people. But it represents an old worldview in American politics, one that dates back to the founding. There is an element of historical truth to this worldview. America did not have universal suffrage at its founding. The Constitution accepted the existence of slavery, and imagined democracy as the responsibility of property-owning white men. But the Founders also created a society where the blessings of liberty they imagined for themselves could be extended to others, the promissory note of which Martin Luther King Jr. spoke. Although the story of American democracy is often told as an unsteady but certain march toward a more perfect union, there have always been people who recount that story as a tragedy, one in which the Founders’ vision of limited government and individual freedom is effaced by the inclusion of those who were never meant to share it. If democracy must be set aside to defend that liberty, then so be it. The Washington Post described the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol as “would-be saboteurs of a 244-year-old democracy.” But true democracy in America is only 55 years old, dating to 1965, the year the Voting Rights Act guaranteed suffrage—at least on paper—to all American citizens, regardless of race. Four decades later, a multiracial coalition elected a Black president. As in the past, the rise of Black men to political power made some white Americans question the wisdom of democracy. That president’s successor, and many of his supporters, now insists that he must be allowed to remain in power despite having lost his reelection campaign, arguing that his opponent’s victory is illegitimate regardless of the results, and demanding that votes from predominantly Black constituencies in swing states be thrown out.
