JD Tuccille: The most dangerous of times for America

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It’s 2024, and in the United States, political advertising budgets have been spent, babies have been kissed (or, in a few cases, bitten by the president in office), the candidates and their supporters exhausted their arsenal of verbal abuse at each other, and the voters finally made up their minds. Now the hard part begins.

Wait. Now begins the hard part? But the campaign season is over!

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Yes, but Americans really don’t like each other, don’t trust each other, and have average confidence in the vote counting process at best. They are increasingly inclined to butt heads to resolve differences. So the easy stuff is over. Now the hard part begins.

“As Election Day approaches, many registered voters are quite concerned about the integrity of the ballot and what will happen after the election,” according to an AP-NORC poll. published last week. “Nearly a quarter of registered voters expect inaccuracies in vote counting across the country, and many fear post-election political violence.”

Inaccuracies in vote counting are inevitable, although they are usually kept to a dull roar, and people tolerate occasional errors and rare instances of fraud. But that’s what you expect in an environment of trust, which is no longer what we have. Entering this election, after years of disputes over voter identity, early voting and who can be relied upon to count ballots, only about 60 percent of voters trust the accuracy of voting in state and local elections, rEPORTS AP-NORC. Only 48% trust the national results.

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Voters — those who didn’t cast their ballots — went to the polls amid news of a student in China who doesn’t have US citizenship faces charges for illegal voting in Michigan. And Maricopa County, in the swing state of Arizona, warns it could take two weeks to produce a number of votes. These reports do not address people’s concerns.

Given the unimpressive level of trust in democratic procedures, it’s no shock that many Americans find the country’s system of government shaky at best. In March, 81 percent of respondents to the Georgetown Institute for Policy and Public Service Civility survey on the battlefield said, “they believe that democracy in America is currently under threat.”

Who makes the threat? This wouldn’t be America if we didn’t point fingers at each other. Seventy-eight percent of Democrats told Georgetown pollsters that “MAGA Republicans” are an “extremely” or “very” serious threat to democracy. Sixty-nine percent of Republicans said the same about the “radical left.” Sizable majorities of both groups called each other’s congressional representatives a “threat to democracy.”

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If you face a threat to the country’s political system, what do you do to deal with it? Well, becoming part of the problem is certainly on the table for a sizable minority of Americans. An April PBS NewsHour/NPR/Maris The survey found that 20% of respondents insisted they “may have to resort to violence to get the country back on track”. That included 12 percent of Democrats, 18 percent of independents and 28 percent of Republicans.

There are indications that some of these may become self-fulfilling. When the Deseret News teamed up with HarrisX polls in August at ask Americans about political violence83% of Democrats said they fear “violence from Republicans who do not accept the election results if Vice President Harris wins,” while 76% of Republicans said they expect such a reaction from Democrats if Trump wins.

Last week, in a follow-up survey of Utahns by the Deseret News and the Hinckley Institute of Politics, 46% of self-identified Republicans and 38% of self-identified Democrats said violence against the government could be justified (for those actually registered as members of the two parties: 52% of Democrats and 43 % of Republicans saw violence as justified). Probably, they meant when the opponents take power.

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There is a precedent, unfortunately. Donald Trump supporters famously rioted at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, after their candidate lost his bid for re-election. Sometimes overlooked, however, is this Trump’s opponents were outraged in Washington, DC, at its 2017 inauguration.

Politically motivated violence has become all too common as people trade punches, firebombs and bullets over partisan disagreements. OFFICE and ballot boxes have been repeatedly set on fire. Last week it was a man from Arizona accused of shooting at a Kamala Harris campaign office, punches have been thrown in recent days people wearing campaign items or opposing his presence. Donald Trump was targeted by two alleged assassins, the first of which drew blood.

“In less than a decade, violence has become a shockingly common feature of American political life,” Robert A. Pape of the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats. he wrote in September. “Indeed, the election in November could be not only the most important in modern US history, but also the most dangerous.”

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Pape believes the tensions stem from America’s transition to a multiracial democracy and the country’s difficulty coming to terms with that evolution. Martin Gurri, the author Public Revolt and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millenniumbelieves instead that it is a battle between “norms and elites” by the Internet’s democratization of information and the loss of status and power of control by those who once comfortably exercised control.

I add that I did excessively high stakes politics. When the state enters all areas of life and claims to exercise veto power over personal choices and important values, people may come to believe that choices are too important to lose. A smaller decentralized government would reduce conflict, giving us less to fight over.

Whether for these reasons – or for other reasons – elections in the United States are now exhausting and dangerous. Election workers shield their offices and sign up for “active shooter” exercises. American voters are getting ready to fight each other over who can torment their opponents in elected office.

The 2024 political campaign is over, but we still have to hope for a peaceful end to our deep and endless political disputes.

National Post

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