Jonathan Gienapp, a professor of history at Stanford and the author of “The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era,” noted by email that there have been close, contested elections in the past,
But none of these earlier examples featured what we see now: a completely manufactured controversy based on no evidence whatsoever, purely to maintain power, and to overturn a legitimate election.
In this context,
Trump’s refusal to concede and his congressional allies’ refusal to object to what he is doing is indeed most dangerous. If it continues to be given oxygen, it’s hard not to think that there could be lasting damage to the republic.
This, Gienapp concluded, “is what rot looks like.”
James T. Kloppenberg, a professor of American history at Harvard, responded to my inquiry with a broad overview, worth quoting at length:
Trump’s refusal to acknowledge defeat is unprecedented. Yet it is consistent with everything he’s done throughout his life, so it should not surprise us. While political scientists often focus on institutions and political practices, democracy, where it exists, rests on deeper cultural predispositions that are harder to see. Unless a culture has internalized the norms of deliberation, pluralism, and above all reciprocity, there is no reason to concede to your worst enemy when he wins an election, nor is there any reason to acknowledge the legitimacy of opponents.
It is just these underpinnings of democracy that Trump threatens, especially now:
Norm-busting has been Trump’s modus operandi from a very early age, so to expect him now to conform to democratic norms is unrealistic. Conceding defeat is a tradition consistent with the ethic of reciprocity: you admit defeat, move on, work with those you disagree with, and try to win the next election. Establishing those norms is the work of centuries, not decades. The colonies that became the United States had been at it since the 1630s. By 1787 those cultural pillars were already in place.
Trump’s behavior, Kloppenberg argues, is the culmination of long-term developments within Republican ranks:
Many conservatives considered the New Deal a repudiation of the laissez-faire dogmas they claimed were written into American life. They were wrong about that, as a generation of progressives had shown for decades before FDR’s election. But from Goldwater and Reagan through Gingrich to the present, many Republicans have viewed deviations from what they consider the gospel of free-market capitalism as heresy. Of course there has never been anything remotely resembling a free market in the United States. State, local, and federal governments were involved in daily life from the nation’s first days. But the fantasy of unrestrained capitalism has endured, as has the strategy of condemning as ‘un-American’ anyone who dares suggest otherwise. Given Trump’s four years of hate-mongering and his stubborn refusal to acknowledge reality, his behavior since the election is to be expected — and criticized as the direct challenge to democracy that it is.
Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, was outspoken:
It would be not simply a major departure but a deeply dangerous one were Trump to deny the legitimacy of Biden’s election. It would be a brutal renunciation of American democracy. It would create not simply a fissure but a chasm in the nation’s politics and government, telling his tens of millions of supporters as well as his congressional backers to reject Biden’s presidency. It would be an act of disloyalty unsurpassed in American history except by the southern secession in 1860-61, the ultimate example of Americans refusing to respect the outcome of a presidential election.
In fact, Wilentz warned:
Trump would be trying to establish a center of power distinct from and antagonistic to the legitimately elected national government — not formally a separate government like the Confederacy but a virtual one, operating not just out in the country but inside the government, above all in Congress.
Wilentz envisaged
a counter-government, administered by tweets, propped up by Fox News or whatever alternative outlet Trump might construct for himself — a kind of Trumpian government in exile, run from Mar a Lago or maybe from wherever else Trump selects to reside in, in order to avoid prosecution by the State of New York.
Wilentz and others argue that Trump is gearing up to violate a principle of peaceful transition established shortly after the founding of the nation.
“You have to go back to the very odd and dangerous election of 1800 for anything remotely similar,” Ned Foley, a constitutional scholar and professor of law at Ohio State, told me via email:
The Federalist Party considered various scenarios for depriving Thomas Jefferson of the presidency, including the possibility of a Federalist acting president if the House remained deadlocked over the tie.
John Adams “was not in on any of those Federalist machinations,” Foley continued, but “it’s worth focusing on just how dangerous it was that the Federalists were thinking of depriving Jefferson of his victory.”
Both Virginia and Pennsylvania, Foley wrote,
called out their militia to make sure that Jefferson would get installed, and the Federalists would not “steal” the election from Jefferson. There was a genuine risk of a civil war.
Nonetheless, Jefferson was inaugurated and in his March 4, 1801 address, declared not only that “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” but told Americans of all political stripes to
bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind.
“From my perspective,” Foley wrote,
the lesson of 1800 is that we are never supposed to go through anything like that again. It’s what started the tradition of the peaceful transition of presidential power from one party to another. It might have been a bit of a rocky start to that tradition, but it was successful.
Wilentz noted that after his defeat in the 1800 election, Adams
wrote bitterly that “we have no Americans in America,” and that “a group of foreign liars, encouraged by a few ambitious native gentlemen, have discomfited the education, the talents, the virtues, and the property of the country.” Adams was so disgusted that he refused to attend the inauguration of his successor, Thomas Jefferson.
Despite this bitterness, Wilentz explained, Adams — in contrast to Trump — “owned the reality that, as he wrote, ‘we federalists’ had been ‘completely and totally routed and defeated.’”