Over the weekend I got a note from a reader, J.S., who went even darker than I’m normally willing to go. His point, which I hadn’t really thought of before, is that “the guardrails” didn’t actually work in 2020—the only reason Trump didn’t overturn the results of the election is because guys with guns stopped their violent attempt.
Here’s J.S.:
When it came to the election in 2020, we had to beat him at the polls. But that wasn’t enough. The election officials had to do the right thing, but that wasn’t enough. The judges had to do the right thing, but that wasn’t enough. Congress and the vice president had to do the right thing and it still came down to the Capitol Police resisting an armed mob.
Every guardrail had to hold and it still had to be backed up by a willingness to resist with physical force.
I’m not suggesting anything like ditching the rule of law and skipping straight to force.
Just that we face an adversary for whom statements and propositions only have to be personally advantageous and not true or logically consistent and that his supporters have accepted and blessed this tactic and that no legal or political process has any legitimacy to them except as it is useful against his enemies and that the only thing they respect is force.
At the end of the day, there probably isn’t anything clever or counterintuitive to do. There is just getting more votes, getting the processes to work and backing it up with the power of the state.
Ugh. When you look at it through this lens you realize that “the guardrails” actually only constrain the forces of democracy.
To wit: The courts ruled against Trump in 2020 and after that, he attempted his insurrection.
But what if the courts had found in Trump’s favor? Let’s just pretend for a moment that the Supreme Court had taken an insane stand and, say, ruled in favor of the Texas lawsuit, which had then invalidated a bunch of other states’ votes, and thrown the election to House.
What would have happened then? Well, Donald Trump would have stayed president. Because “the guardrails” only limit the side that adheres to the rule of law.
Like J.S. says, there’s nothing to be done about this—the belief in the sanctity of the rule of law is what makes one side the good guys and the other side the bad guys. This is why the people who are seeking to remove Trump from the ballot via the application of the Fourteenth Amendment will accept a ruling from the SCOTUS that goes against them while the forces of illiberalism merely promise violence and chaos if they don’t get the verdict they want.
But it does mean that we should not be sanguine about what’s going to happen in November. No matter how many “guardrails” Trump and the Republican party bump up against, they are unlikely to take no for an answer until the power of the state is invoked to uphold the final guardrail.
So gird yourselves for a prolonged struggle.
