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, rumor, and conspiracy theories for a very long time.”

 

Then there’s Trump. Consider all the things he has said over the years that have repeatedly questioned the legitimacy of the electoral system in its entirety. During the 2015-16 primaries (the process by which each party decides who their candidate will be), he repeatedly said that “If I didn’t win by massive landslides”, then it means his own party’s system is rigged. Similarly, he alleged, the other party’s system was rigged to ensure that Hillary, not Bernie Sanders, became the official candidate.

 

As the 2016 elections came closer, and polls suggested Hillary would win, he said:

“The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary.”

Of course, Trump won in 2016. But he still claimed the election was a fraud!

“In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

 

This is what more and more people in the US, Democrats and Republicans, believe. That the elections were rigged this time rigged by insiders who wanted Biden to win. Or by outsiders (aka Russians) in 2016 who wanted Trump to win.

 

All of that is what led to the events a couple of weeks back:

“This is a divide on the very legitimacy of the entire democratic system. Under these circumstances, the horrifying violence last week should not have been a shock. When a democracy has become illegitimate in the eyes of a big plurality of the voters, and therefore the wrong man is due to take office next week, and the entire Establishment is widely seen as behind this coup, the only recourse is violence.”

 

In India, while we are repeatedly disgusted when MLA’s and MP’s jump ship and do post-poll alliances, we also know the rules of the game allow for that. More importantly, as a nation, we don’t question the very election of an MLA or MP. While the system has its glaring flaws, we don’t think the constitution has been subverted. And unlike Trump, even the Laloo’s, Akhilesh Yadav’s, the Communist Party, Congress and BJP yield power when they lose elections and can’t cobble a majority via post-poll realignment. That’s a positive thought to end this blog on.