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Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
Had Kamala Harris won the US election last month — and it was close, remember, despite the tone of the coverage since then — would Donald Trump have conceded defeat within 24 brisk hours? Would Republicans in Congress be preparing to certify the result in the new year? Would the party’s voters accept her as the legitimate president when asked in polls? On all three counts, there is enough doubt that posing the questions doesn’t seem exotic.
Without quite acknowledging it, American politics has arrived at an understanding. One side can ignore the rules of the game — to the point of challenging election outcomes without proof of fraud — and the other can’t, or at least doesn’t. In the language of the street, but also of game theory, the Democratic party is the sucker. If it were one of the two detainees in the prisoner’s dilemma, it would confess to a crime, the accomplice wouldn’t, and jail would beckon for the former. The prisoner at least has the excuse of ignorance. Democrats are aware of being diddled.
This isn’t tenable. The ultimate risk to the American republic is that Democrats give up their unilateral observance of basic norms. The system can survive, just about, one of the two main parties going feral. It can’t survive both. And so the story isn’t that Joe Biden has pardoned his son, having promised not to. (Even Jimmy Carter, tower of Baptist rectitude, pardoned the “first brother” and Libya enthusiast Billy Carter.) The story is what far worse behaviours it might augur from the Democrats in future, given the incentives they face.
Behaviours such as? Giving up on normal leaders and elevating a demagogue of the left: a Huey Long for our age. Or choosing which election results to honour. Or embracing a leftist version of deep state theory: a total rejection of the US system. The federal judiciary is now permeated with Trump appointees at district, appellate and Supreme level. The tech and finance sectors, which together run much of the architecture of modern life, are pro-Trump to a growing extent. And all this is before his second term, during which his tentacles will spread. Soon, it might be senior Democrats arguing that institutional America is against them, and that survival is not compatible with playing by Marquess of Queensberry rules.
Here is a prediction. At some point, a Democrat of note will write a liberal version of Michael Anton’s “Flight 93” essay. To recap, Anton is the conservative who told his peers in 2016 that Trump, however potentially harmful, was preferable to certain doom for America under godless liberalism. For all its histrionics, the argument had internal logic. If you believe the entire constitutional order is compromised, and the other party unscrupulous, it would be mad to act as normal. Anton’s disgust was less for Democrats than Republicans: for observing the usual niceties, for nibbling on crumbs from the enemy and calling it half a loaf, for revering Burkean decorum when Leninist hardball should be the model.
The Democrats are ripe for a similar eureka moment. Even now, the trend of the party’s behaviour is alarming. Aside from the unpardonable pardon, the Democrats tried to sneak an obviously too old Biden past the electorate until a televised debate exposed their lie. (Might the nation have so much as a “sorry”?) With luck, this is a phase, not a trailer for the future. This column doesn’t suggest that Democrats should break the rules of the game. But their objective interests suggest they eventually will.
How might I be wrong? Well, game theory assumes that all actors are self-seeking. It doesn’t account for patriotism, or the capacity for shame, either of which might keep the Democrats in line. A liberal would say that Republicans haven’t played fair since Newt Gingrich untamed them in 1994, that none of the last three Democratic presidents were treated as wholly legitimate on the right, and that Democrats, despite all these provocations, have not retaliated in kind. Values guide human action, not just incentives.
To which I’d say: the incentives have never been as clear as now. Until a month ago, the Democrats could tell themselves that Republican rule-breaking incurs swift punishment from voters. 2018, 2020 and 2022 were proofs. All that changed in November. A man who tried to overturn a presidential election won the very next one. What reward is there for observing protocol, then? When does honour become a mug’s game? For now, the atmosphere on the left is one of tired acceptance. But in a reversal of the stages of grief, it might be that anger comes later, as a generation of liberals emerges that despises their elders as civilised to a fault.
Two reckless parties: it is unthinkable in a mature democracy. But so, just a decade ago, was the simultaneous debasement of Labour and the Conservatives in Britain. The culmination was Boris Johnson versus Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, the Iran-Iraq war of elections.
It could happen in the US. In fact, the wonder of the Biden pardon is that Democrats haven’t done much worse, much earlier. Comparing Trump to 1930s fascists never captured the true nature of his threat. Those despots wanted such grandiosities as “one people, one realm, one leader” or “ . . . nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”. The danger for America is that Democrats succumb to a more banal motto, the eternal refrain of the cynic. “Everyone does it.”
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