Will the United States Survive the 2016 Election (continued)

Sandy Levinson

More recent update (post-debate):  It is crystal clear that the major event of the "debate" (beyond Chris Wallace's resolute failure to ask a single question about climate change or global warming) was the refusal of the sociopath (who was clearly trying to adopt a more "serious" mien this evening save when he just couldn't contain himself) to agree to abide by the election results.  And the refusal is, in effect, twofold.  Not only is he continuing to raise completely unmerited doubt about the basic fairness of the vote, but he also continues to cast calumnies on Secretary Clinton and suggest that she is unfit to be President and would be a "disaster" as President (i.e., exactly the charges I am more than willing to make with regard to his own fitness to be President).  So I think that the possibility of a "good sport" concession is absolutely zero.  I suppose it would be marginally better for him simply to say on November 8 that "Crooked Hillary" prevailed in what was, after all, a fair election but that the country will deeply regret their mistaken choice than to say that the election itself was "rigged" and thus fundamentally illegitimate.  But surely nobody should feel more optimistic about our country's political stability after this evening than before.  He continues to be a menace in almost every conceivable way to our "Republican Form of Government."

Update:  I note for the record that Dana Milbank has a piece in the Washington Post with the temperate title "Trump supporters are talking about civil war.  Could a loss provide the spark?" The central theme is that their sociopathic champion has apparently persuaded them that the only explanation for his loss is a "rigged" election at the behest of "Dishonest Hillary."  Will the useful idiot Mike Pence continue to tolerate the fact that the leader of his ticket is engaged in de facto insurrectionism or will he actually feel compelled to say something truly strong and to the point, such as "my running mate is a clear and present danger to the stability of our country"?  I'm not holding my breath.


I take it that my earlier postings in this series may seem at least a bit less hysterical and over the top given whatever validation is provided by the fact that many media are now raising the possibility not only that the sociopath heading the Republican ticket may well not concede the election (whatever his ostensible running mate may say), but also, in some ways more importantly, supporters of the ticket may regard the outcome as illegitimate, should the sociopath not win, and resort to one or another method of violence.  See, for example, the lead in a NYTimes story that, ironically or not, indicates that the useful idiots within the Republican Party who are supporting (or at least not "non-endorsing" the sociopath), led by the vice-presidential candidate Mike Pence, are now sufficiently worried to be issuing statements about the election's legitimacy:  "Republican leaders and election officials from both parties on Sunday sought to combat claims by Donald J. Trump that the election is rigged against him, amid signs that Mr. Trump’s contention is eroding confidence in the vote and setting off talk of rebellion among his supporters."  What is touching, of course, is that they believe that those within the sociopath's "base" who are indeed "deplorable" will take the word of political elites (especially Democratic election officials) that the political system is not thoroughly rigged. 

Indeed, I confess that I have extremely mixed feelings about a Washington Post column by my friend Nate Persily and his associate Jon Cohen that emphasized that Americans are losing their faith in democracy and, importantly, "in each other."  It is not that I disagree with their data.  What I object to, though, is the unexamined premise that we in fact live in a genuine democracy and that it is, therefore, "losing faith in democracy" to raise serious questions about the nature of the American political system, including the various ways that it is indeed rigged (among other things, in favor of residents of small states (the Senate and, to some extent, the electoral college) and, of course, the monied).  For the first 75 years, after all, states with significant numbers of slaves got a distinct bonus in the House of Representatives and the electoral college, and the ability of the "reconstructed" but not really fundamentally changed states to deprive African-Americans of the right to vote meant that losing the war in fact got them enhanced power in the House (and electoral college) because 3/5 had changed to 1/1, but with too rare exceptions, especially after the turn of the 20th century, the actual electorate remained firmly white and racist.  Things did change, of course, with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but the Republican Supreme Court seems determined to gut it.  If Antonin Scalia were alive, there can be little doubt that a number of states would be allowed to conduct their elections next month in a manner willfully designed to limit the African-American vote.  Moreover, and at least as much to the point, a primacy explanation for the grievous continuing racial inequalities in American life is the fact that African-Americans were systematically deprived of most of the benefits of the New Deal, and relatively few were able to take advantage of the most important affirmative action program in American history, the GI Bill of Rights following World War II that in many ways created the modern American middle class.  Anyone who has a scintilla of doubt on this score should read Ira Katznelson's magnificent book Fear Itself:  The New Deal and the Origins of our Time.  The awful fact is that Black lives did not matter to all too many New Dealers, including FDR himself, given the political realities that required accommodating racist supporters of the New Deal for whites.

I did, after all, write a book several years about about Our Undemocratic Constitution, and Michael Klarman is just publishing a book with the Oxford University Press on the Philadelphia Convention, which he describes as a "coup" by nationalists who were afraid of any strongly democratic impulse among the newly independent American people. (I believe that Klarman's book will be the subject of a forthcoming symposium on Balkinization.)

Still, the Persily-Cohen column is important and worth mulling over.  I often emphasize the degree to which very few people seem to believe that "We the People" are truly capable of the "reflection and choice" that Publius endorses in Federalist 1.  How can any "democracy" sustain itself without sufficient confidence in our fellow citizens to believe that the model of "reflection and choice" makes sense?  If we reject it--and I am tempted to say "simply" because one political party has nominated a uniquely unqualified sociopath--then, at the very least, American presidents and others should have the integrity to renounce the "democracy project" that has been a linchpin of American policy, sincerely or not, since at least the time of Woodrow Wilson and perhaps Abraham Lincoln, given the professed belief in government by the people and not only for the people, which might well be provided by a benevolent despot.  

This is and "existential" election, and not only because it is essential to reject the sociopath and hope that the Republican Party returns to a semblance of sanity.  Rather, what is equally being tested is whether "we" continue to believe in anything worthy of the term "democracy," or whether that is to be limited to a minimalist form of Schumpeterian "electionism" that should purportedly satisfy us so long as regular elections continue to be held, however the candidates are actually chosen.  

Finally, I cannot forbear from quoting from Charles Krauthammer's excellent column on October 13, in the Washington Post.  It is not only that he is yet another honorable Republican who has no use for the sociopath.  It is also highly relevant that Krauthammer was in fact trained as a psychiatrist, so perhaps that gives some special force to his words that mine do not (and perhaps ought not) have.  In any event, Krauthammer writes, "That Trump crashed because of a sex-talk tape is odd. It should have been a surprise to no one. His views on women have been on open display for years. And he’d offered a dazzling array of other reasons for disqualification: habitual mendacity, pathological narcissism, profound ignorance and an astonishing dearth of basic human empathy."  I take it that this "dazzling array," the subject of another Krauthammer column that you can link to, can be condensed, at least for laypeople, into the term "sociopath."  
Posted 6:03 PM by Sandy Levinson [link]