Alexis de Tocqueville called national elections in America a recurring “revolution in the name of the law.” Perhaps the most thoughtful observer of the new world’s bold experiment, de Tocqueville was enamored with the rule of law, that guiding principle our Constitution mandated.
As the fundamental tenet that prohibited certain bloodlines and the descendents they produced, or any sort of special class of elites, from establishing arbitrary double standards meant only to legitimate corrupt personal whims, he viewed the rule of law as the cement on which egalitarian ideals could actually inform governance at all levels. Free and fair elections were the most necessary product of the blind justice its proponents dispensed. They ensured that democracy’s foundational ideals would propagate through the generations.
Two and a half centuries later we can be certain that the OG Americanophile was prescient in his focus on our electoral process as a vital requisite for national success. Indeed, it’s impossible to argue that collective confidence in, not simply the reliance of our election cycles, but the legitimacy of their results, hasn’t been the beating heart of our country’s existence. After all, perhaps our greatest President was first inaugurated and then reelected within the throes of civil war. National calamity has yet to meaningfully postpone an American election or diminish its results.
Of course, there are enough warts, most notably the shameful denial of voting rights to everyone but white men for more than half our existence, to mock as hubris any delusions about the U.S. as some pure gold standard of political pluralism. Yet and still, throughout our story, the inherent certainty of its electorate that their participation will be, not only allowed but encouraged, and their vote will be fairly counted, has made for national unity and the stable governance it makes possible.
Since 2016 we have learned that one simple human trait has been responsible for our success. Without it we now understand the going as a democratic concern gets very perilous. What we once took for granted we now realize we cannot do without. Good faith, enforced by some demonstrable degree of honor and the sense of shame it inflicts, has always been the secret sauce of the US electoral process.
The non-negotiable understanding by all U.S. candidates for elective office that, at the end of the day, once the votes are counted, maybe even recounted if the results are close enough, an obligatory concession speech must be given to congratulate the winner and give blessing to the process that selected them is the key to the realm. Without that collective obedience, it is hard to see our electoral process not descending into the type of perpetual chaos we used to assume our system was immune to.
On that awful Tuesday of November, 2024 America pulled the trigger and blew our civic brains out. Since then the entire political, societal and media landscape has held white-knuckle close the assumption that the 2026 mid-term election cycle offers a panacea to the specter of Trump 2.0. As the parade of polls has documented Trump’s plunging personal approval numbers, combined with an increasingly lopsided Democratic advantage on the “generic ballot” front, such reassurance has become salvational, the answer to all our prayers… our get out of hell card.
During the same time period a parallel effort of equal determination has been made to ignore the seditious fact that neither the POTUS, who has become wholly incapable of tempering his madness, or the Republican Party that now consists entirely of servile minions to his rabid whims, possesses even a sliver of good faith toward anything, least of all the willingness to graciously accept electoral defeat. These twin realities sit poised to carve out our national destiny.
Less than 30 days remains until America reaches a reckoning. What happens the first week of next month will determine whether we are a badly injured but still breathing body politic capable of at least a decisive expression of no confidence in the very worst our indifference elevated, or nothing more than a corpse to be further desecrated, just another failed state rotting on the heap of stench its useless apathy has piled high.
Whatever happens, the DR is going to bear witness. The banality of our current evil frustrates description. Trump is such a pathetic wretch, it’s very difficult to reconcile him with the existential moment in history he and his party of craven cowards have driven us to. Nonetheless, these next four weeks must be chronicled by those who refuse to normalize our nation’s ugliest chapter. Stay tuned. BC