A platform for sense and decency … and smackdowns of reactionaries

Yet another both-sides-do-it claim: “MAGA faithful have taken election denial to the extreme, but both parties have nurtured the problem for decades.” Seriously? Democrats’ assertion — backed by facts in the Mueller Report — that Russia interfered in the 2016 to help Trump is characterized, bizarrely, as the equivalent of some 70 post-2020 lawsuits challenging Biden’s win? Those lawsuits were dismissed for their failure to allege facts.

A debate can be had as to whether Russia’s interference determined the outcome of that election. Indisputable, though, is the fact that the interference occurred. Ergo, Democrats’ claim that Russians helped Trump is based on reality. Trump’s claims about a “stolen” election are pure invention, not because anti-Trumpers say so, but because, when invited by judges (Republican and Democrat) to offer evidence in court, he failed to do so.

We’re told that “[a]n even greater threat to democracy has long been hyper-partisanship — when people choose party loyalty and wishful thinking over empirical data and election results. Cognitive biases, like confirmation bias, play a huge role in supporting such a fallacious thought process to detrimental ends. … Trump is a symptom of this much larger problem.”

All true, but how does this relate to “Election denial and the Big Lie: Sure, Trump made it worse — but both sides do it”? First, party loyalty and wishful thinking are — always have been — features of democracy, not aberrations. Second, Trump may be symptom of a larger problem, but his conscious decision to create a fantasy world for his fantasy-addicted worshippers has no parallel on the Democrats’ side. What, then is it that both sides are doing?

Also true is that election-related “chicanery dates back to the early days of the republic”. Does this mean chicanery is an inevitable part of democracy? That we must accept it because 150 years ago it was part of the political landscape? This reeks of modern jurists — each a Republican — who insist on divining the intent of the 18^th-century powdered wig crowd as the sole authoritative method of Constitutional interpretation.

Further, a “big-picture analysis reveals that Trump was simply trying to complete what George W. Bush started in 2000 when the Supreme Court simply declared him the winner of the presidential election”. Trump is the product  of a trend, certainly, but one that started in 1980 with Reagan (a Republican deity, if memory serves), and his rhetorical degradation of legitimate government. And Republicans openly and consciously chose Trump.

It may also be true that “the very people who oppose Trump helped create the context in which his ‘big lie’ can flourish and become legitimized. Indeed, the Lincoln Project Republicans and Liz Cheneys of the world, who almost universally defended Bush’s illegitimate [sic] presidency, created a context where elections could be stolen in plain sight”. Yet again, glaringly absent from this context creation — and election-stealing — are Democrats.

“More important for contextualizing Trump, U.S. citizens came to understand [via W’s appointment] they lived in a country where they knew their president had been placed in power by fellow elites.” It’s unlikely the 2000 election was the first to open voters’ eyes to “fellow elites” who put a president in power. The authors also refuse to recognize the sui generis nature of the five Republicans who chose the country’s president by judicial fiat.

The authors beaver away for facts that might support their both-sides-do it theory. They chastize “Clinton and her DNC supporters [who] spent four years spreading false and baseless reasons for their defeat, blaming progressive voices such as Sanders …, Russian interference and social media fake news for ‘stealing’ the election, or at least influencing the outcome.

Is it “false and baseless” to say that Sanders voters chose not to vote at all rather than vote for Clinton; that Russia interfered; or that social media — and its obsession about Hillary’s emails — played a role in the election’s outcome? Reasonable people can disagree over the impact these things had on the outcome. But “false” suggests an intent to mislead, and “baseless” means zero facts to support the claims. There’s no evidence for either.

The authors ascribe an odd meaning to “election denial”. They equate it with 2016 post-mortems to understand how the “experts failed to see a Trump victory coming … [l]ike the QAnon fanatics and Trumpists of today”. Did Democrats file countless lawsuits challenging the vote count? Did they try to prevent Congress’s certification of Trump’s win? Did Clinton ask a state election official to find her additional votes?

Equally weird is the translation of Democrats’ pre-election “warnings that Russia and Trump were working to steal the election” into “both parties primed their voters to reject the results”. Where Trump had rumors of election fraud,” Democrats had facts related to Russian efforts. And, with his request to find additional votes in Georgia, Trump confirmed Democrats’ pre-election warnings about his intentions. Fact/fiction: spot the difference.

With the assertion, “In 2016, Clinton officially conceded, but continued to publicly deny the election results,” the authors serve up the standard dim vs. disingenuous dilemma. Didn’t her concession affirm rather than deny the results? Notable, too, is the authors’ elision of Trump’s refusal to concede to Biden, presumably because that bit of reality would have undercut their both-sides-do-it trope.

Clinton did say in an interview that the election “was not on the level. We still don’t know what happened … but you don’t win by 3 million votes … and not come away with an idea like, ‘Whoa, something’s not right here’”. She referred to Russian interference as well as vote suppression efforts in a number of states. Facts support both assertions. Saying so does not amount to “election denial”.

Desperate for coherence, the authors claim both parties created “electoral cynicism” over decades by refusing to concede elections. Clinton’s alleged “den[ial]” in 2016 led to cynicism that “Trump exploited” in 2020. Hillary’s fault again? But for her, Trump would have accepted Biden’s victory, there would have been no lawsuits, and Trump supporters wouldn’t have tried — through violence — to prevent certification of Biden’s win. Right.

The closest the authors come to both-sides-do-it evidence relates not to election denial but the nonsense about Obama’s not being American. “During the 2008 Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton’s campaign was the first to exploit this vulnerability,” alleging that birther claims originated with Clinton. Alas, even on that easily verifiable point, reality is different in that she was not the point of origin or the exploiter.

In the end, the authors’ premise peters out. They admit that “Democrats did nothing like [storm the Capitol] in 2016,” but leave us with the anemic “who knows the degree to which continued hyper-partisanship will escalate electoral denialism in the future”. Who knows, indeed. But, on the record that we do have, it’s only Republicans whose entire ethos has been, and — as they’ve said — will be to deny the results of elections they don’t win.

The authors’ wildly errant parting shot: “The point remains that denial and refusing to accept the election outcomes was very much part of the Democrats’ narrative from 2016, parroted by MSNBC and CNN in particular. It’s not just Fox News and Trump that are the problem here. It’s a “civic decay.” If decay it is, it’s one to which the authors have materially, if unwittingly, contributed with their low-quality work.