In a recent newsletter, Jamelle Bouie offers a necessary corrective to how the press, pundits, and politicians celebrated the certification of Donald Trump’s election victory last week as a “peaceful transfer of power.” As he says, it is dubious whether Trump and the GOP would have assented to a 2024 election loss, and far more likely that they would have done what they could to overcome the will of the voters. The verdict remains out on whether the U.S. has returned to its previous tradition of the loser accepting presidential election results until it’s the Republican Party’s turn to concede defeat.
But the emphasis on whether or not violence occurred in this one moment obscures the larger anti-democratic import of Trump’s re-election. You can see this in Kamala Harris’s comment at the certification proceedings, where she told Congress that, “Today, America’s democracy stood.” While this might be technically true when considering that this January 6 went off without a Trump-incited violent insurrection, it ignores the events that led to Trump’s second election win. Most recently, Trump campaigned on an explicitly anti-democratic platform, vowing to rule by powers that a president does not have and to jail political opponents. Trump’s election run was also dedicated to escaping the consequences of his insurrectionary actions by reclaiming the mantle of presidential power, with which he could dismiss any remaining federal charges against him for his many crimes.
In other words, we should be aware of the deep irony of Harris’s remarks. No right-wing violence interrupted the proceedings (and why would it, since Trump had won?), yet the election of a man who has essentially vowed to tear down democracy throws cold water on the idea that “Today, American’s democracy stood.” It would be more accurate to say that with the certification of the second election win of Donald Trump, America’s democracy stands in grave peril. It is not enough to say that all is good with the world if the mechanisms of democracy have brought to power a man dedicated to its demise — all the more so when his path to power was paved with lies about his previous record, about his plans to help working-class Americans, about the record of his predecessor, and about the need for his supporters to hate and revile their political opponents and immigrants.
A celebration of the January 6 certification also reinforces an insufficient view of what Trump tried to do that day in 20201. Interfering with the election’s final step was accompanied by parallel efforts, weeks-long and non-violent, whose overall intent was to overthrow the election results, an action indistinguishable from overthrowing American democracy itself. From this perspective, it is more accurate to say that the insurrection begun by Trump four years ago to subvert American democracy has now achieved terrible success, as the man who previously tried to destroy our constitutional order now assumes office on promises to do just that. The tragedy that we must face, and overcome, is that so many Americans have chosen to abet this act of national self-destruction, and that so many Democratic politicians are loathe to acknowledge the threat.