Today, in theory, will conclude the 2024 presidential election, one of the most bizarre in American political history. From inner-party coups to assassination attempts, Kamala’s Brat summer social media trend to Trump’s courting of comedian podcasts, the campaign cycle has been saturated with the unconventional. It has, of course, also seen its expected share of shallow, political, rhetorical rhetoric and general economic illiteracy, which are the cornerstones of modern democracy.
The general superficial nature of mainstream political discourse, though, should not distract us from recognizing foundational truths about the state of modern American politics. No matter the outcome, the legitimacy of American democracy is broken.
In 2020, this was in full display, as was the response from Donald Trump and his supporters. Fueled by the unprecedented changes to the election under the shadow of covid, President Trump refused to concede the election. Polls showed the majority of his supporters agreed with him, and from that seed of distrust grew renewed concerns over illegal voters, manipulable voting machines, and rising awareness over the security of vote-by-mail ballots. To this day, large portions of the country continue to believe the Biden administration was illegitimate.
How would Democrats have reacted in the face of a similarly close race resulting in a Trump victory last election? While the counterfactual is impossible to consider in practice, hints were already publicly available before election day 2020. In Biden campaign war games, John Podesta, a long-time Democrat operative, outlined a strategy quite similar to the one Trump embarked on. As reported at the time, this included Democrat-swing state governors being pressured into promoting friendly alternative electors to vote in the electoral college under the guise of reversing Republican “voter suppression” efforts. Unlike the Republican response in 2020, this appeal would have been strengthened by blue-state secession threats should Trump have been inaugurated.
Would Joe Biden have followed through with this strategy if this alternative timeline had played out? We will never know. Nor can we know the potential effectiveness of this strategy, though it is likely such efforts would have been treated quite differently than Trump’s response.
Still, as we look forward, what is clear here is that the willingness for either side to accept, without question, the basic machinery of American politics has broken down significantly. The centralization of power within Washington, which consistently elevates the stakes of national politics, coupled with significant ideological shifts (particularly on the left), and the perceived danger Trump represents to American political institutions, regardless of his demonstrated ability to follow through after 2016, has created a dynamic where the incentives to concede power for the alleged “national good” have all but broken down.
Each side is motivated by a spirit of self-preservation, not politics.
Hellbound and Down 