Study: People think undermining democracy is ok if others do it first
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
It's so hard when a couple bricks taken away can crumble faith. Having a larger frame, where we don't catastrophize bad incidents, where we are resilient against bad examples & keep going, is a damnably hard ask.
Reinforcing democracy thus requires that, after an election, everyone reaffirms their shared commitment to the process, reaffirms the legitimacy of that shared process, and affirms the legitimacy of those selected pursuant to that process.
As a foreigner from a flawed democracy, what I used to admire the most about Americans—more than free markets or free speech or anything else—is their commitment to process. It used to be that Americans would jump off a bridge if directed to do so pursuant to a proper process.
Good examples are the conduct of every Republican who lost a presidential election up until Trump: H.W. Bush, Dole, McCain, and Romney. (Possibly before that but I wasn’t alive then.) Nobody alleged cheating. Nobody impugned the rules. Nobody denied that their successor has the mandate—both legally and morally—to govern. And of course Trump is exactly the opposite of that. Not just because of the outright lying. But the whole chain of conduct from calling into question the reliability of the post office, criticizing the reliability of the voting methods, etc.
Really, there's just not much partisan to say about this, other than that Trump, who happens to be a Republican, has the distinction of being the only President in the history of the United States not to honor the process.
This was from a quick google search, there are probably more sources and more stories about the others you mentioned. There is no one candidate to blame here, most of them have some sort of story they concoct about why they lost and some conspiracy they attribute it to. The blame lies with anyone who is such a tribal political member (D or R) that they simply cannot accept anything non-nightmarish about the other side.
Paying lip service to a failed process does not make the process more robust, it simply papers over the issues until it finally breaks, to worse outcomes and pain. There are enough elements that are questionable in the US election system that it is not unreasonable for people to be doubtful of it, esp. in the hyper-partisanship of today.
The solution is not to pretend to go back to an era of gentlemen's agreements, but rather harden the process so that nobody except the real cranks and lunatics could feasibly say anything. The problem is that too many people now are happy to write off entire swaths of the country as "loonies and cranks" because of their own hyper-partisanship.
There were definitely allegations of cheating when JFK won in 1960 over Nixon.
It happens with every close election. In effect, it's a nonpartisan issue.
The reason Bush, Dole, McCain, and Romney didn't complain is that they all lost by a significant margin. There was no basis for complaint.
In recent decades, Republicans have won most of the close elections. That's why Democrats have been the sore losers. Trump is the first Republican in recent times to lose a close election.
(Trump is unique in complaining about voter fraud even when he won in 2016, because he wanted people to believe that he got the popular vote too, not just the electoral college. Which shows, by the way, that the popular vote does matter. Trump also alleged that Obama wasn't a native born American, so he was trying to undermine elections that he wasn't even running in.)
My takeaway is that close elections inherently tend to undermine the legitimacy of democracy. And maybe they should, because it's pretty crazy to have huge differences in policy determined by very small margins.
Edit: and here is a commentary piece on Nature from the lead author: https://socialsciences.nature.com/posts/why-voters-who-value...