A win (and a loss) for democracy

The American electoral system was stronger when the sun rose Wednesday than it was the morning before — but not simply because President-elect Donald Trump won the White House. Nor was it left without suffering some lasting injuries, either.

Two things are essential for electoral government to function. One: Votes must be fairly and accurately tallied and reported. Two: The public must believe that is the case. If the first breaks down, the system is no longer representative. If the second breaks down, it doesn’t matter anyway. Accuracy and trust are the essential foundations of a free society (a key reason that “democracy” can’t simply be airdropped into Iraq, Afghanistan, or other places where governing honesty and mutual trust are not ingrained in the society).

The Democratic Party faithful were not asked who their nominee would be — they were told. The experts knew better, and maybe they did?

Going into Tuesday, both suffered in the United States. The previous presidential election was beset by “glitches,” new regulations, broken rules, and suspicious counts. It’s unlikely we’ll ever understand how 129 million people voted in 2016, 137 million in 2024, and a whopping 155 million in the mail-in no-check days-long COVID-emergency election, so let’s not dwell on it any longer. Either way: The trust was shattered.

The necessary ingredients to rebuilding that trust were not just a return to expectable numbers, but a quick election decided while Americans were awake. That’s a hard thing to pull off, but to their everlasting credit, election officials did it. While counties that (rightly or wrongly) had garnered suspicion publicly stated that it might take days or even weeks to count the ballots, by and large, results came in.

Better yet: Urban counties kept up with rural counties. Again, rightly or wrongly: Large, late-night, election-altering ballot dumps from partisan cities do a lot to undermine the opposition’s trust that the election is being run fairly and properly.

And then there’s the money. Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign and its friends raised nearly $1 billion in just months — almost three times the money Trump and Co. raised. Since the dawn of American politics, people have grumbled sagely that money buys elections. As with 2016, 2024 was a blow to this rule. That’s not to say the person with the most money deserves to lose — just that it’s healthy to see it happen from time to time.

Then there are the powerful interests, which have earned their reputations as the bogeymen of the republic since slaveholding planters first battled it out with Northeast traders. While Trump earned wider high-profile backing than at any other time in his political career, Harris garnered the support of the vast majority of the country’s rich and powerful. That billion-dollar campaign wasn’t built on $5 donations.

Sometimes the rich and the powerful are correct about what direction the country should be heading in, but again, it’s good to know they can’t always make that decision for us. And that’s where we get to the bad parts for American democracy: what it means and how it functions.

There is a powerful contingent among the American elites, in the federal and state bureaucracies, and in the sprawling world of international and national non-governmental organizations who believe that their strategic interests, plans for your children, novel concepts of fairness and justice, and opinions on morality, science, gender, and sex are the proper “democratic beliefs.” In this framework, opposition to their agenda is “anti-democratic.”

You see this method of thinking all across the United States, the Anglosphere, and the European Union. The United Nations is a particularly egregious offender. Like it or not, an overarching message since January 2020 has been that the experts don’t care what you think – and further, the experts will tell you what you think. As an exercise, next time you hear someone complaining about Trump’s “assault on democracy,” replace the word “democracy” with “the elite agenda” or “the bureaucracy.” There you’ll have it.

Harris’ nomination was the epitome of this and is both the reason the past four months have seen the worst of this rule-by-experts since COVID — and the second wound the Democratic Party has laid on American governance.

The Democratic Party faithful were not asked who their nominee would be — they were told. The experts knew better, and maybe they did? A primary would have been messy, and the money already raised needed to be protected, after all. The transition from President Joe Biden to his running mate might have been forced on the old man, but in public it would need to appear peaceful and seamless. The Democratic voters told whom they had picked, however, didn’t quite buy it.

Worse: It set a very undemocratic precedent. While it didn’t work out for Harris and the Democrats, we have now officially determined that you can replace a nominee without an election if it’s clear that the nominee is not going to win. That’s not great. It undermines the system and the trust, simultaneously.

Of course, few of the guilty parties are going to talk about that, if they even realize it at all. There will be no introspection, no autopsy. Harris will be blamed as the weak and lazy candidate she always was. Biden will be blamed as the fading and elderly, power-obsessed man he always was. But the people who put them there won’t look inward. After all: Everything they did, they did for their democracy. And you don’t want to be undemocratic, do you?

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