Don't let Trump set the norm for democracy
Don't let Trump set the norm for democracy
Efforts to distort reality will put American voters to the test
This is what matters — and you shouldn’t let any would-be autocrat convince you otherwise. (Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash)
If your job is to oversee elections and make sure they’re run fairly, you’d probably notice if a political operative carried a blue WalMart bag stuffed with ballots into your office. You’d pay attention, of course, because elections in the United States are carefully administered, meaning that Americans don’t typically haul around shopping bags full of sealed ballots.
That’s what happened in my Upstate county four years ago, according to revealing testimony that emerged the other day in a federal courthouse here, where three county political appointees are on trial for conspiring to manipulate local election returns by filling out ballots on behalf of scores of workers on the county payroll.
“They came in a bag and there was a large amount,” a county election commissioner testified. “I’m not sure the quantity, but it was an amount that would make me be, like, ‘Hmm, that was a lot of ballots.’ ”1
That testimony might lead you to imagine that Republicans are right in their push for legislation — both in Congress and in states they control around the country — that they claim will guard against ballot fraud. Maybe, though, a glimpse of our local scandal might persuade you that it’s actually hard to commit large-scale election fraud in the United States, that it’s rarely done, and that the real effort to defraud voters these days is being committed by operatives loyal to Donald Trump — who still insists that he really won in 2020 by millions of votes, and that Democrats are trying to rig this year’s election to cheat him again.
Perhaps I should apologize upfront here for focusing on this issue, because a lot of us are beyond weary of Trump’s election fraud schtick. After all, his claims fizzled in courts nationwide. Out of 64 challenges to the 2020 results that Trump’s team filed, all but three failed: He pulled out of 14 cases and 47 were dismissed outright by federal judges, including Democratic and Republican appointees (eight of them picked by Trump himself). Only three cases succeeded, all in Pennsylvania, leading to 270 votes being discarded — out of 155 million ballots that were cast.2
But while Trump’s claim of fraud is and always has been baseless, it’s far from harmless. The Big Lie of Trump led to the brutal January 6th insurrection and criminal convictions involving some 900 people who were there. More recently, it prompted a showpiece bill to tighten voter identification rules that failed in the House this week, but that could yet cause a government shutdown. It prompted a partisan Georgia board to order hand-counting of ballots there, despite warnings that the move could cause chaos in the days after the election.
And, perhaps most significantly, it has laid the groundwork for Republicans to dispute the results nationwide even if Kamala Harris beats Trump fair and square in November — which is especially alarming to people who care about democracy and those charged with keeping the peace in our communities.
All that is beyond troubling. But even more is at stake because of the habitual duplicity of one dangerously unstable man, and we need to be ready for that.
Two-thirds of Republican voters, and perhaps one-third of Americans overall, according to various polls, continue to believe Trump’s baldfaced lies about “massive” fraud, including the notion that Joe Biden became president only because of fake voters and rigged machines. It’s what social scientists consider a “mass conspiracy belief,” which more often surfaces in religious contexts.3
The implications of that distrust of election results are ominous in light of the upcoming vote: A poll this month asked Republicans what Trump should do if he isn’t confirmed as the winner in November, and one-quarter agreed that “he should declare the results invalid and do whatever it takes to assume his rightful place as president.”4
Millions of Americans, then, would seem to be willing to follow Trump’s lead if he insists once again that he has been fraudulently denied the presidency, even if his evidence is as flimsy as what he has touted ever since he lost to Biden by seven million votes four years back. We should worry that those “whatever it takes” partisans might be as willing as the January 6th rioters were to take matters into their own hands.
Yet the would-be insurrectionists aren’t the only people we should worry about. Gallup reports that Americans’ confidence in the way our democracy is working fell from a high of 61 percent in 1984 to just 28 percent at the end of last year — meaning that a lot of people who don’t back Trump also are dubious of the way our government works. For their own reasons, surely, a lot of Democrats and Republicans are united in their disillusionment with our government.5
That’s not surprising, in a way, since our Constitution sets us up for disappointment if we expect pure democracy. Thanks to the electoral college, two of the four presidents elected in this century got to the White House even though they lost the popular vote, and Congress is similarly unresponsive to the popular will because the Constitution gives smaller states extra clout in Congress. The Supreme Court in recent years — with five justices appointed by those presidents who got to the White House without majority support — has regularly issued rulings at odds with what most Americans say they want, including key decisions to allow easy availability of guns, to let corporations give to campaigns without much restriction, and to eliminate women’s right to an abortion. So it’s no wonder our government is unpopular these days: It doesn’t reflect our cumulative best judgment.
Beyond that reality, though, we are hammered into unhappiness by Trump’s dystopian view of American life. He has repeatedly claimed, falsely, not only that our elections are rigged, but also that our economy is in worse shape than ever before, that crime is rising and rampant, that our national security is at such historically weak levels that we are at the verge of World War III and that our borders are overrun by people who have fled other nations’ prisons and mental hospitals. None of that is true. NPR fact-checked an hour-long news conference Trump gave last month; it documented 162 lies and distortions.
That casual mendacity is unmatched by anything in American political history. We’ve become almost inured to the constant diet of Trumpian hyperbole and prevarication, to the point that it doesn’t get the media coverage that even a fraction of such talk would have elicited by candidates in earlier times. Yet it all has impact. It’s particularly effective in convincing people who are prone to believe Trump because they are Republicans, of course; for example, a poll this summer found that Republicans trust Trump on election information more than they trust any other source, including government certification of election results.
And it sets the stage for Americans to be entrapped by a phenomenon familiar to psychologists who study what’s called social norms theory. That notion holds that our own behavior is influenced by our misperceptions of the reality that surrounds us — that, for example, if we think most people around us are misbehaving in a certain way, we will allow ourselves to similarly misbehave.
A good example of how that happens, and how it is combatted, is seen in some colleges’ response to rampant heavy alcohol use by students: They have tried to limit the problem drinking by pushing back on the notion that everybody drinks a lot in college, focusing on a contrary message that heavy drinking is outside the norm.
Perhaps the best example of a social norm at work is revealed in Americans’ tax payments. By the best measures of economists, Americans pay about $5 out of every $6 they owe in taxes. You may say that tax evasion is a problem if about 16 percent of owed taxes aren’t paid, and it’s certainly true that all that missing money could go a long way toward closing the federal deficit. But it’s conversely true that since 84 percent of the taxes lawfully owed are in fact paid, we could be seen as a law-abiding society. It is the social norm to pay our taxes, and we follow it.6
So how do we judge our America and this democracy? Long after Donald Trump has left the political scene, that is likely to be the lingering tragedy of his presence. He has redefined the social norms of political candidacy and of our respect for democratic traditions. These days we have hundreds of Trump wannabes on ballots across the country, many of them eagerly drawing attention by making outlandish claims backed by offensive rhetoric and offering radical ideas. Moreover, millions of Americans have come to believe Trump’s dark vision of our nation, which leads them toward a willingness to abandon democracy in the interest of restoring order. That is, it’s increasingly a social norm to accept that we need measures beyond what can be accomplished with our votes, because America is broken.
In fact, it is not. Crime is falling, and more Americans have insurance to protect their health care than ever before. We are economically stronger relative to the rest of the world than we were during Trump’s presidency. Our military is the most powerful in the world. Our culture leads the planet, whether you measure that by the music of Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, the novels of Colson Whitehead and Marilynne Robinson or the poetry of Ocean Vuong and Ada Limón (we could go on and on here, you know).
In fact, people around the country aren’t hoisting bagsful of ballots into government offices — though Trump partisans did just that in my community — nor are most candidates willing to abandon the electoral system as unalterably broken. In a scalding on-air essay last month, Joe Scarborough, the MSNBC host who was a Republican member of Congress, took issue with those who buy into Trump’s harsh assessment of America. “It’s a strange form of patriotism,” he noted, “to say that America is only great if one leader is in power, and that if that leader is not in power then America is in decline.”7
That is what America’s Trump-inspired toxic partisanship has left us. It has reset the norm by siphoning our confidence in the capacity of this democracy, and led tens of millions of Americans to trust one would-be autocrat over tens of millions of ballots.
Against that backdrop, our task in the weeks ahead is clear: We need to reassert the norms of American democracy. The Democrats’ vice presidential nominee, Tim Walz, was on the right tack in labeling today’s Republican Party as “weird.” Rather than succumb to the impulse to embrace the darkness or accept the new norms by copying Trump and his ilk, we need to be clear that the Trump approach is contrary to the way Americans normally approach public service, democracy and each other.
That is, we cannot lose our trust in what can yet be. We have to keep hope alive.
https://www.timesunion.com/capitol/article/we-re-playing-chess-texts-examined-ballot-19779983.php
https://www.witf.org/2022/09/01/these-republicans-did-a-deep-dive-into-2020-election-lawsuits-including-in-pa-heres-why-most-of-them-failed/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/355068117_The_Rise_of_Presidential_Eschatology_Conspiracy_Theories_Religion_and_the_January_6th_Insurrection
https://www.vox.com/politics/372863/2024-election-lies-trump-overturn-harris
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/06/09/democracy-europe-biden-trump-2024-election/
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-big-is-the-problem-of-tax-evasion/
https://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/morning-joe/donald-trump-america-decline-republicans-rcna167237
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