By DOUG SHAVER
November 26, 2010
As the election approached, I felt sure that no matter who won, the loser’s followers would take to the streets in riots across the nation, convinced that the election had been rigged and stolen. It now seems that I was mistaken. That is never an entirely pleasant discovery, but all things considered, I’m glad to learn that I was wrong about the riots.
About the losers being convinced that the election was rigged against them, I’m not so sure I was mistaken. Trump himself is still saying there was no way he could lose an honest election, but there is no way to know whether he really thinks that. When anyone says, “I believe X,” I ordinarily take their word for it, but there is nothing ordinary about this man. Except among his followers, he is not famous for his honesty. As for his followers, they have to say that they believe everything he says. Never mind what they really think: “The president said it, I believe it, and that settles it.” Of course some of them really do believe it, but we don’t know what fraction of the Trump tribe they constitute.
The absence of evidence for election fraud on a scale sufficient to produce the announced outcome doesn’t seem to matter much to Trump’s True Believers, but that’s what being a True Believer is all about. You’re told what to believe in order to belong to the tribe, and having been told what to believe, nothing else matters. When anyone asks you, you say you believe it, or else you’re kicked out of the tribe, and the human brain has been so wired by natural selection that you tend sooner or later to actually believe things that social forces compel you to say you believe. It doesn’t always happen, because our biological heritage is not our destiny, but it does happen to lots of people for whom their tribal identity matters more than just about anything else.
So as far as Trump’s tribe is concerned, nothing has changed. He has not been repudiated. His enemies—those people who hate America and all the good things it represents—just managed somehow to win their latest battle against him and against America itself. But at the same time, for the various tribes of Trump’s haters, nothing has changed either, except that one of their number now occupies the office of the president. Those who believe that the 2016 election was a victory for racism are not now saying that the 2020 election was a defeat for racism. The people who believe that America is a racist nation did not change their minds after Obama won the presidency in 2008 or after he was re-elected in 2012, and they’re not changing their minds now.
As Eric Hoffer explained in the book he published almost 70 years ago, that’s what being a True Believer is all about. We have a mass movement here. Call it woke, call it social justice, call it progressivism, call it critical theory, call it whatever. The movement’s leaders will tell you what to believe, and you’d better believe it, or else.
That much noted, we’re not going to fix anything by just wailing “A plague on both your houses.” Both houses do have legitimate grievances against the system, and the system is resolutely ignoring all those grievances. The result has been a government without the consent of the governed, and such a government cannot long endure. The system actually fell apart in 1861 for reasons analogous to those dividing us now, and despite some of the worst carnage in the history of human warfare, the restoration did less to redress the grievances than to redirect the nation’s attention to other matters that could be made to seem more important. Those other matters did not include consent of the governed. The Southern states were told in effect that, whether they consented or not, they would be part of a union in which slavery was illegal. They did say, “We consent,” but it was hardly a voluntary consent. It was about as voluntary as Germany’s consent to the terms of the Versailles Treaty. And so, while white Southerners could no longer own black people, they found ways to treat them as if they were still their slaves, and they got some sympathy from plenty of white Northerners while they were at it.
Our current conflict is not about slavery. Our first Civil War did settle that question. Nor is it the same kind of regional conflict, since the regions involved are so intermingled. It is a cultural conflict, and each culture’s adherents are practically everywhere, and if it evolves into a shooting war, there will be no battle lines. With or without shooting, though, war is hell, and civil wars are the most hellish. It would be nice to avoid the next one—or to end it, if, as some of us think, it’s already started.
The conflict is about unredressed grievances, as was the case in 1861. The prevailing sentiment then within both major factions was that their petitions for redress were falling on deaf ears, that the various interests in actual control of the government were just indifferent to their legitimate concerns. In terms of consequences, the actual legitimacy of their concerns was beside the point. Each side was convinced that its cause was just and therefore, if violence was necessary to achieve its goal, then the violence would be justified. And was the violence necessary? The North said the South had made it so, and the South said the North had made it so. And that—their mutual intransigence—was what made the violence necessary.
And both were so intransigent because each was convinced that any concession to the other would betray whatever principle it was defending. The Confederacy was as certain as the Union was that it was engaged in a moral crusade, and when you’re doing that, it’s hard to justify any sort of compromise.
I am no pacifist. Plenty of things are worth defending with deadly force when those who threaten them leave us no other reasonable option. But moral crusaders often seem disinclined to consider any options besides compliance with their demands to be reasonable. They’re just thugs who have convinced themselves that they have a good excuse for being thuggish. And that is why people who claim to be on a moral crusade make me nervous. This has nothing to do with whether I agree or not with whatever moral principles they advocate. It has to do with their indifference to Cromwell’s rule: “Think it possible you may be mistaken.” Trump’s followers will not consider that possibility, and neither many of the woke left.
We will have a new administration in a couple of months, but we will not have a new nation. We the people are the nation, and we haven’t changed. Those who thought we used to be a great nation and that Trump was trying to make it great again will still think so. Those who thought we have always been a nation of white male fascist oppressors will still think so. And the rest of us who want to be left a little more alone will still want that. The pursuit of happiness still matters to us. Without a right to such pursuit, our rights to life and liberty are not all that useful, and so we do not consent to any government that would dictate which happinesses we are allowed to pursue. We get it that no rights are absolute. I may not, in the pursuit of my own happiness, require others to forego their own. But the incoming administration counts among its constituents a tribe of moral crusaders who seem convinced that one of the tribes to which I belong depends for its happiness on the oppression of certain other tribes. Those crusaders have already gained much power, both political and economic. We who have neither would like to negotiate with those crusaders, if negotiation is still an option.
If it is not, then the recent election did not change anything that really mattered. Some of us feared that would be the case no matter who the winner turned out to be, which was why we voted for various people other than Trump or Biden. We knew we would get one or the other, but we would not consent to either. And neither did most Americans. When a gunman says “Your money or your life,” you’re not really consenting to being robbed if you hand him your money. The Democrats went into this election hoping that “Your vote for Biden or four more years of Trump” would sound like a similar choice. Some 47 percent of the voters didn’t see it like that.
Those Democrats who are still in wonderment that Trump came as close as he did to winning are as clueless in their own way as the Republicans who think he could not have lost unless the vote had been rigged. Both delusions represent a massive out-of-touchness with the American people in general, and this is a disconnect that precludes any good-faith effort to secure the genuine consent of the governed.