The election is now 12 days out. The polls are moving in Donald Trump’s direction. Both campaigns are crisscrossing the country; both are hitting the swing states, with the candidates and/or their surrogates. On November 6th, we’ll all probably be breathing a sigh of relief. But, as I’ve noted several times recently, the election will only be the beginning.
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On Tuesday, over at RealClearPolitics, columnist J. Peder Zane has some interesting thoughts on the whats, hows, and whys of what happens next. And I have some thoughts as well.
We have seen this movie before. The Democrats refused to accept Trump’s victory in 2016; he still won’t concede that President Biden won in 2020. As before, neither side will blame themselves for defeat; they will lash out at their perceived enemies. Each will advance their favored conspiracy theory – Trump will rail against the press and deep state, Democrats against foreign influence and misinformation – but both will cast the result as illegitimate.
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Read: Let’s Say Harris Wins. What Happens Next?
Let’s Say Trump Wins. What Happens Next?
Suffice it to say that no matter who wins, there will certainly be unrest, possibly violence, depending on who wins and by what margin. But what I found interesting in Mr. Zane’s piece is something that presents a clear statement as to a huge difference between Republicans and Democrats, at least now, in 2024. Zane writes:
In its current incarnation, the GOP is a bottom-up party. None of its ranking eminences wanted Trump to be the nominee in 2016; almost all of them hoped he would go away after his 2020 defeat. The MAGA rank and file felt differently.
If Trump loses, he will fume and smolder and inflame the body politic. Millions of his supporters will be outraged. But they are largely powerless to influence events.
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Yes, the GOP is, now, a bottom-up party. Donald Trump and the MAGA movement have seen to that, and, whether the older establishment types like it or not – and a lot of them don’t – the Republican Party is Trump’s baby now. If Trump loses, there may be some protests, but Republicans don’t riot, they don’t loot, they don’t commit arson on grand scales; if there is physical unrest and violence, it will be fomented by the left. Zane continues:
The Democrats, by contrast, are a top-down party. While no one should be surprised by a repeat of the contained violence their supporters unleashed around Trump’s inauguration, the real action will occur once more in the corridors of power.
In a repetition of Trump’s first term, party leaders will refuse to accept his election. An army of Democratic Party lawyers is amassed, awaiting instructions on how, and where, to challenge the results. If, as the polls suggest, Democrats retake the House, they have already floated the idea of refusing to seat him, invoking the Civil War-era 14th Amendment to claim he is a Jan. 6 “insurrectionist.” Assuming that gambit fails, they will almost certainly launch multiple impeachment efforts against him while their stenographers in legacy media continuously cast him as an existential threat to the Republic. As during Trump’s first term, every day will be a nonviolent version of Jan. 6. You cannot, after all, find common ground with Hitler.
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Ay, that’s the rub. Let’s say the Democrats lose the White House but take Congress; in such an event there will be impeachment efforts and lawfare on a galactic scale. The left is completely unhinged at the very idea of Trump; they will not be content to wait until 2028 to try to win an honest election. They will bend every effort to bring Trump down, and any unrest in our major cities will be overlooked and even abetted by a Democratic Congress – I remind you, the current sitting vice president, now a candidate for the President of the United States, helped raise bail money for rioters, looters, and arsonists.
See Related: As Trump Surges and Harris Stalls, NYT Columnist Asks, Then Answers Idiotic Question About TRUMP
Mr. Zane concludes:
It pains me to say that the next four years will be more bitter than the last eight. We, the people, have painted ourselves into a corner by turning to the unforgiving world of politics to find identity and meaning. Will we ever find the courage to say enough?
And here’s where I think he misses the main problem. It may well be too late for the American voters to just say “enough.” Politics is a nasty business, granted, and has been since the Macedonian Pausanius stuck a blade in King Phillip II, whose son Alexander then rose to the throne – you may have heard of him. But the American republic was based on a Constitution that has been one of the most stable, most lasting governing documents in human history. The top-down party, the Democrats, seem all too willing to ignore it – to refuse to certify an election, to attempt serial, unfounded impeachments, and even to foment unrest.
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That’s the real danger we face right now. And no Alexander is going to save us. We’re going to have to do it ourselves.