Trump can’t be saved from himself, but voters can save democracy from Trump
Dan Hannan
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Donald Trump is a menace to democracy. He threatens the foundation of the American republic, namely the peaceful and consensual transfer of power, which demands both restraint from winners and consent from losers. Trump plainly cares nothing for these things. The former president’s lack of self-control, mendacity, and neediness should disqualify him from contention for high office.
These, though, are arguments for voting against him. They are not arguments for jailing him, or for using lawfare as an alternative to the ballot.
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His behavior after the 2020 election ought to have caused a popular backlash. That the backlash was instead directed at former Wyoming GOP Rep. Liz Cheney made me want to weep. Undermining democracy should, in a democracy, carry an electoral penalty. But that penalty should be handed out under the Constitution — by You, The People.
If denying an election result were a criminal offense, Hillary Clinton would have been indicted after the 2016 poll, which she called “illegitimate.” Indeed, half the political class would have been indicted over hanging chads in 2000.
In any case, there have been much more serious violations of the Constitution — going to war without congressional approval, for example, or abusing emergency powers to sideline the legislature. Such breaches were rightly seen as political rather than legal in nature, and it was understood to be up to the voters to punish infractions at the polls.
The great philosopher Karl Popper argued that the virtue of democracy was that it allowed governments to be changed without anyone being exiled, jailed, or shot. This lowered the price of participation, so governments were not dominated by strongmen. It meant that the people in charge exercised self-restraint, knowing that whatever powers they amassed today would be in their opponents’ hands tomorrow.
Under any system, there will be wannabe tyrants, men of uncontrolled ambitions and appetites. Some countries look to their supreme courts to protect them from such men. But, in the United States, the first and last line of defense is the electorate. It is for voters to stop Caesarists at the polls, not for some quasi-legal process to sabotage their candidacies.
Look at what is happening around the world right now. This column regularly laments that liberal democracy is in retreat, but the precise form of that retreat is worth considering. We talk of elections being “rigged,” but this is rare because it is almost impossible to falsify election results without everyone being in on the scam.
No, the usual way for dictators to stay in office is not to cancel elections but to be picky about who is allowed to contest the elections. I wrote here a couple of months back about Imran Khan, Pakistan’s former prime minister, who had been removed in what was effectively a coup but whom all the opinion polls showed as the most popular politician in the country. Since then, Khan has been imprisoned on trumped-up charges so that the election will happen only among candidates approved by the armed forces.
This has always happened in nasty dictatorships. The Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was assassinated in 2015, and his successor, Alexei Navalny, is in prison. Belarus, which always found ways to bar the most popular candidates, has now taken to closing down opposition parties without pretense.
But the tendency is spreading to former democracies. The recent Turkish election, for example, was fair in the sense that Recep Tayyip Erdogan won more votes than his opponent — but only after a more popular opponent had been given a prison sentence for insulting the Supreme Election Council. The leader of India’s opposition was also recently sentenced for using insulting language. Even in so stable a democracy as Germany, the president has suggested banning the populist right-wing party Alternative for Germany, implicitly likening its rise to that of Hitler.
This is how every one-party state works. Communist dictatorships had regular elections. But, unless you were in one of the sanctioned popular list parties, you could not stand.
Does this really need spelling out? Human beings have a natural tendency to see their opponents as deluded and dangerous. That is why we should bend over backward to ensure that those who have a transient majority, or who control the courts, don’t get to narrow the range of candidates.
Let politicians argue for whatever idiocies they want — incest, terrorism, rent controls. The more outlandish the idea, the more we should rely on voters to reject it. In the end, the people cannot be saved from themselves. That is what the American experiment is all about. Please, Americans, don’t mess this one up.