Cooperating in the Peaceful Transfer of Power Is Foundational and Non-optional
Last night’s 2024 Biden-Trump debate: First thoughts/initial reactions/impressions
Last night Biden and Trump had a debate. I could give the same thoughts that I’m sure thousands of others are also giving right now, or have already given—
that Joe Biden had the hoarse, raspy voice of an old man on his deathbed;
that Trump accused Biden of being a liar, which (Trump being such a big—not even liar, but such a big and next-level post-modern post-truth entertainment-media figure) takes some gall, even for as galling a figure as Trump;
that Biden had surely been coached, perhaps too well, and sometimes seemed to me to veer into a milder version of the embarrassing error that sank Marco Rubio, when Chris Christie got him to repeat his memorized script over and over again in that debate a few cycles ago;
that Trump had surely been coached, and managed not to spend the whole debate interrupting and talking over Biden and making himself look terrible, the way Trump did in 2020;
that both of them sound more and less like old men who sometimes struggle to assemble a whole sentence without getting the pieces mixed up, and that in both their cases I’m not sure it’s at all a new development or that they haven’t been doing it since long before they were this old...
—but I’m sure others have all that amply covered.
So instead let me focus on the one thing I think matters more than all the rest put together, the thing that’s prior or fundamental undergirding everything else—which I also think has gotten and/or is going to get not nearly as much attention and consideration as it should, as preliminarily indicated by the fact that Biden didn’t think he should dwell on it at the time, during the debate:
The debate moderator said to Trump, Will you say now that political violence is always unacceptable, and that you will accept the results of the election, whoever wins?
Trump responded by saying, Political violence is always unacceptable (not entirely what he was saying at the time, either on January 6th or in that debate in 2020, but I’ll take it, better late than never), and I said that at the time (again, not entirely).
After giving Trump a long opportunity to answer the other question, the moderator repeated the question: Will you accept the results of the election, whoever wins?
Trump’s answer was not a simple Yes, which should tell all Americans all they need to know, to turn away from him forever and not give him the time of day, much less their vote.
(Specifically, Trump said he will accept the results if the election is fair, which especially in light of his failure ever to accept that he lost in 2020 is a coded way of saying that he’ll accept the results only if he wins, which is no different from the worst possible answer, that he doesn’t accept the election at all unless it happens to coincide exactly with what he wanted to do anyway. But the specifics don’t matter; any answer to the Constitution and peaceful transfers of power other than Yes is unacceptable in our small-“r”-republican and small-“d”-democratic system.)
Some on the right fantasize about the coming of a post-democratic Caesar, imagining that somehow that will improve anything; but even they know that, in the case of the original Caesar, the results were terrible (specifically, the country falling apart, civil war, “Rome descended into abject chaos and was never the same again”).
I dwell at more length on the particular proponent, a single example, only because he speaks for so many others who share more or less the same views:
“would arrive to destroy the Left regime”—and replace it with what, exactly? Again, in the case of the antecedent you yourself cited to introduce the concept, the answer would appear to have been a dictator for life. I’m not trying to put words in your mouth; perhaps I misunderstand what you were saying in the first place?
“kind of dead”—fans of The Princess Bride will know that mostly dead is significantly different from dead. I’m not that big a fan; I’d prefer to say, What did you think the American order consisted of? I agree that the left’s march through the courts etc. over the past century or so in America has significantly undermined the limited-government vision of the founding, the individual-rights framework, and the structural constitutionalism that are all important parts of our system rightly understood. The left are no fans of the Founders, and I’m no fan of the left. Nevertheless, the Founders’ work has proven so durable, that so much of our institutions still remains, that America has among the strongest free-speech protections in the world, among the strongest gun rights in the world, and (with now one exception, in 2020-2021) an unbroken record of two and a half centuries of peaceful transfers of power. Those may not be everyone’s favorite examples—fair enough—I think America compares favorably to other countries in many other ways, too. Pick your examples.
So, 10% dead, 90% alive? 25-75? Even if you rate it something like 50-50, I wouldn’t recommend pulling that trigger.
What countries are you comparing America to, where we aren’t still an amazing, historic-exception success story by comparison? I know some people from other countries where even managing one peaceful transfer of power is still too great an accomplishment to manage, something for them to aspire to someday. That is more nearly the rule, America the exception, across times and places in human history.
As someone has commented somewhere, perhaps, ours is a terrible system, except for all the alternatives.
Meanwhile the American Revolution is more or less the only revolution in world history that succeeded in not leaving a country worse off than before. What reasons do you have for confidence that the revolution and war you dream of will end better than most?