I've mentioned him a few times here, but Sam Harris really hits the nail on the head with regard to the dangers to our democracy Trump poses and the damage he's already done. I've cut and pasted a part of
the transcript of his post mortem election podcast episode called "
The Reckoning," but I encourage listening/reading the whole thing. I think sensible people on both sides of the political spectrum will agree with a lot of it.
In terms of offering political commentary, Sam is one of the smartest people out there (Heather Cox Richardson is also really good). I feel like many of us here would agree with what he says in that podcast, but this part about the damage Trump has already done to the country is spot on:
Trump is what you get when 51% of a society just declares bankruptcy on core moral values and political principles and journalistic ethics and necessary institutions. There is no real defense of Trump and Trumpism. All his defenders act like his critics just don't like the man's style. He's just too crass or bombastic. Or they think we're worried about hypothetical things that might never happen. We're worried he might become a fascist in the future. And needless to say, these concerns are telltale signs of Trump derangement syndrome. But none of that is true. The problem with Trump isn't his style, and it's not merely what might happen in the future. The problem is what has already happened. It's the damage that Trump has already caused to our democracy. It's the fact that he has turned the Republican Party into a personality cult that celebrates all this damage as a sign of progress. For instance, while many of us really wanted Kamala Harris to win on Tuesday, we are also breathing a sigh of relief that she didn't win by a very narrow margin.
Why are we relieved about this? Because Trump and Elon and several other high-profile well, freaks, spread so many lies and conspiracy theories about election fraud that they effectively rigged our society to explode. On the day of the vote, Trump and Elon were both spreading lies about a terrible fraud being perpetrated in Pennsylvania. Now that Trump won, where's the concern about fraud? It just evaporated. I guess Elon looked into it and our voting machines are fine now, right? Pay attention to what happened here. These guys imposed a serious risk of injury on our whole society for purely selfish reasons. The fact that we're now relieved to have avoided a civil war is itself an injury to our democracy and to our social order. Is this too ethereal a point to understand? If someone rigs your house to explode and the bomb just happens to not go off for reasons that they didn't actually control. It seems to me that they don't get to say, Well, no harm, no foul. Let's just move on. Let's agree to disagree about what happened here. No. You put our whole democracy at risk with your lies. You knowingly raised the temperature and the pressure on your side of the electorate, again, with lies, and ran the risk of producing serious violence if things had gone the other way.
Honestly, there was a moment on Tuesday night when the tide had fully turned against Harris, when the needle over the New York Times website was giving Trump an 89% probability of winning, but the blue wall states had not been decided. It was still possible at that point for Harris to win. One in 10 chance events happen all the time. But I remember thinking that I hope she doesn't win now. Because at that point, given the optics, given that Republicans really thought they had it in the bag, and that even Democrats seemed to think that and thought that publicly in plain view of everyone on television and social media. If Harris's luck had turned at that point and she had won, we could have had a civil war, given the degree to which conspiracy thinking had been weaponized by Trump and his enablers. Again, even on election day itself, these lies had been spread consciously, deliberately. Elon did this personally to hundreds of millions of people on the social media platform that he owns. Given all of that, honestly, I think it simply wasn't safe for Harris to win a free and fair election at that point.
That is a totally crazy thought to have had on election night in America in the year 2024. Where do we send the bill for the damage that has been done to our country? Half of our society just elected a man to the presidency who they know would not have accepted the results of the election had he lost. Vice President Harris conceded the next day, as everyone knew she would. There is probably no one who supported Trump who thinks that he would have done what they fully expected Harris to do, which is to protect the most important norm of our democracy, the very thing that makes it possible, the peaceful transfer of power. The astonishing thing is that Trump supporters are totally okay with this asymmetry. They expected Harris to concede and would have demanded that she do it, and yet they know Trump wouldn't have conceded if he lost, understanding all the risk this would have posed to our social fabric, and they are fine with that. That is already the ruination of our politics. That is what the path to fascism looks like. We are already on it. There is nothing hypothetical about this. Bad things have already happened, and this It's true whatever happens over the next four years.
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