A group of 22 historians released a statement Monday noting that the 2020 elections weren’t even particularly close, historically. Mr Biden has won as many or more electoral college votes in five elections since 1960 as the winning candidates and more majority votes than in more than half of the presidential elections held in the past six decades.
“However, in none of these elections has a lost candidate attempted victory by brazenly sabotaging the electoral process, as Donald Trump did and continues to do,” said the letter, written by Rice University’s Douglas Brinkley and Sean Wilentz from Princeton University. Among those who signed was Michael W. McConnell of Stanford University, a former appeals court judge who effectively dismissed the efforts of one of its former employees, Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri.
Mr Trump’s allegiance to the concept of American democracy has long been debated. From the earliest days of his campaign for the White House, critics suggested that he harbored autocratic tendencies that raised questions about whether he would eventually undermine democracy or try to stay in power even if he lost, questions that loud enough that he felt compelled to react. “There is no one who is less fascist than Donald Trump,” he emphasized in 2016.
But Mr Trump did little to allay those fears in the years that followed. He admired strong men like Putin, Orban, President Xi Jinping of China and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, and showed envy of their ability to act decisively without the control of a democratic government. He asserted at various points that the constitution “allows me to do whatever I want with the special adviser investigating him” and that his “authority” is total to order states to obey his wishes.
He tried to turn government agencies into instruments of political power and pressured the Justice Department to persecute his enemies and spare his friends. He made extensive use of the implementing ordinances sometimes decided by the courts and went too far. He was charged with abuse of power by the Democratic-controlled House in 2019 for pressuring Ukraine to help him tarnish Mr Biden’s reputation, despite being later acquitted by the Republican-run Senate.
When Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt published their bestselling book How Democracies Die in 2018, warning that even the United States could slip into autocracy, they were repulsed by some who thought they were overstating the case. “We have been criticized by some as alarming,” said Ziblatt, a government professor at Harvard University, on Monday. “It turned out we weren’t alarming enough.”
Mr Ziblatt said a healthy democracy requires at least two political parties that know how to compete and lose. “I hope and think we will get through the next few weeks,” he said, “but our democracy cannot survive in a recognizable way for long unless we have two parties that are committed to the rules and norms of democracy.”
