Trump's assault on democracy follows Democrats' lead

Hey, Democrats, word to the not-so-wise: This whole “assault on democracy,” in which Trump and millions of his followers are questioning the election results? You helped make it happen. You set the precedent.

You never got over Al Gore losing to George W. Bush in 2000, and you kept whining about how unfair it was. And yes, it was unfair. But the system itself was to blame: a system you not only agreed to play by, but one that you propped up half a century ago when you could have changed it. (More on that below.)

Then, in 2004, you thought something was fishy in Ohio, so you challenged the election results in Congress. The challenge went nowhere, and the actual nominee — John Kerry — quickly and graciously conceded. But the precedent among party regulars for whining about “rigged” and “stolen” elections was further cemented.

Then came 2016, and I’m not just talking about the general election. In the primaries, Bernie Sanders’ supporters cried foul about the overwhelming number of superdelegates who pledged to support Hillary Clinton. The impression was created that Clinton was going to be the party’s nominee, come hell or high water: that it was a coronation, not an election.

Queen Hillary

For all the talk of King Donald, there a similar unstated assumption that Clinton was destined to be Queen Hillary. She’d paid her dues. She deserved it. Never mind what the electorate wanted, and “one person, one vote” be damned. If Sanders managed to get enough actual votes in the primaries, the superdelegates would block him.

The impression was that the Democratic Party was going to foist Clinton off onto voters, whether they wanted her or not, and that she was ordained by the gods to be not just the nominee but the next president.

A lot of people didn’t like that. Was it enough to swing the general election to Donald Trump? If I were a betting man, I’d say yes.

(The irony is that these voters who picked Trump got exactly what they were trying to avoid in Clinton: a monarchical president.)

In the four years since the 2016 election, many sour grapes Democrats have decried the 2016 election as stolen, because Clinton did, in fact, with the popular vote by something like 2.8 million ballots. Clinton herself, although — unlike Trump in 2020 — she conceded, has spent a lot of time complaining about the election, too.

Failed system

But as in 2000, this was a case of the system failing: The Electoral College failed to reflect the will of the people. Democrats agreed to play by this system, so they can’t try to rewrite the rules retroactively.

While most of us have forgotten, were too young to pay attention (like yours truly) or hadn’t been born yet, it was Democrats who torpedoed the only real chance to get rid of the Electoral College. The year was 1970, two years after segregationist candidate George Wallace threw a monkey wrench into the presidential election by winning five Southern states and the electoral votes that went with them.

Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate, won anyway, even though he barely scraped by in the popular vote. Still, he recognized that things could have gone the other way in the Electoral College, so he backed getting rid of it. So did the House, which passed a constitutional amendment to that effect.

But an odd alliance of segregationist Dixiecrats and big-city Black and Jewish leaders teamed up to kill the bill in the Senate. The fragile coalition of southern segregationist and northern patrician Democrats had already begun to fracture, and was destined to break apart in the Reagan era, but it had just enough legs left to kill the only realistic chance we’ve had to abolish the EC and bring our presidential vote into alignment with the principle of one person, one vote.

Fingers pointing back at you

So, Democrats, you have no one but yourselves to blame for this one.

Would Donald Trump have been just as bad a president regardless of how he got elected? Almost certainly. Would he have thrown a fit upon losing this year without the Democrats having whined about 2000 and 2004 and 2016 (the last three elections they lost)? Count on it. It’s part of his (lack of) character.

But this kind of whining wouldn’t have been normalized in the minds of so many Americans if it hadn’t happened so often and so recently. Many Trump critics justifiably accuse him and his followers of normalizing bad behavior and upending institutions. He’s a master at it. But he’s not the one responsible for making sour grapes a part of the American election landscape. For ploughing the field with talk of election fraud and sowing the first seeds of doubt in our democratic systems.

Sorry, Democrats, this one’s on you.

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Featured photo: Hillary Clinton at a campaign rally in 2016 at Arizona State University, by Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons 2.0.