Erosion of Credibility
What led to the insurrection in Washington DC? There are many in the US who believe that Trump’s supporters know their guy lost and yet refuse to accept the result. But I suspect that’s too simplistic. Rather, I think Andrew Sullivan gets it right . The legitimacy of the electoral process, he writes, has been hammered away, bit by bit, over a period of… decades! It started off with close elections that were then pursued via the right channels. When Bush won in 2000, the narrowness of the victory meant that it had to be decided by the Supreme Court. In 2004, there was a “nasty spat over counting Ohio’s Electoral College votes”. That “spat” was limited to their parliament, not the streets. Then came the result of 2016 when Trump’s win stunned everyone: “In 2016… many, many Democrats kept insisting that the election had somehow been rigged by the Russian government, in collusion with the Trump campaign, and the US media went on to beclown itself with innuendo, rumo...