Populism vs. Pluralism: The 2020 Election and Its Aftermath

Photo by By Tyler Merbler - https://www.flickr.com/photos/37527185@N05/50812566861/, CC BY 2.0,

I am still struggling to make sense of what happened on January 6th. The facts are clear but hard to grasp, like a nettle. President Trump, determined to overturn the results of a free and fair election, incited a mob to attack Congress and prevent it from validating Joe Biden's victory in the Electoral College. The insurrection failed, but it left five people dead, the U.S. Capitol ransacked, and any remaining notion that the United States is a stable democracy in tatters.

I suggest we view January 6th as a dramatic escalation of the conflict between populism and pluralism in the United States. Given the shock of their transgressions, it might seem like the populists are winning. However, amid the fray of the 2020 election, I see a different picture emerging, one that should encourage those of us who count ourselves as pluralists. Let me explain why, starting with the scene of the crimes.

The Capitol, and the Congress seated in it, are where we go to hash out our differences as a people. We have plenty of them, and that is by design. As an institution, Congress embodies pluralism as a fact and set of values. Our founders extended the sphere of our republic to take in a wider variety of interests, beliefs, and agendas than the conventional wisdom at the time thought was possible or wise. Their goal was to keep any group from getting and keeping the upper hand unless it reflected a large and enduring majority. All relevant viewpoints are meant to be represented in Congress – and to be weighed and balanced, if not reconciled, with competing views. These myriad perspectives, and the differences between them, set the stage for the deliberation and debate essential for lawmaking in a free society.

Whatever your views on what our national government should do, you are sure to find legislators expressing them with vigor. Only Congress encompasses all the relevant points of view in a disputatious nation teeming with them. Neither the Presidency nor the Supreme Court can come close to reflecting and representing the country's full diversity in a democratically accountable fashion as Congress does. That is why the Founders made Congress the first branch of our national government and vested the power to make laws within it.

Despite its pride of place in our constitutional order, political scientists have long observed when it comes to valuing and trusting our governing institutions, Congress is in effect Public Enemy #1. It is easy to see why. Congress is where what Americans like least about politics takes place in the open: partisan bickering, divisive debates, unseemly horse-trading, and convoluted processes. Gripe as we might, this is the stuff of democratic politics – i.e., peaceful problem-solving in a free society.  For all of its maddening imperfections, what goes on in Congress still beats the incoherent violence of last week's riot. 

The mob President Trump incited to overrun the Capitol and intimidate Congress was simultaneously attacking other institutions and arrangements through which pluralism flourishes. The mob attacked our federal system, which enables citizens of states as disparate as Minnesota and Texas, or Florida and Alaska, to practice self-government as they see fit, including how they administer elections and allocate their votes in the electoral college. The mob attacked our system of free and fair elections, in which all eligible citizens have the chance to vote their various preferences for who should hold which offices. Finally, the mob attacked the rule of law itself, which ensures that everyone—even the most powerful office-holder in the land—is bound by and beholden to the same laws.

It is no accident that, in the denouement of his populist presidency, President Trump and his ardent supporters turned on the governing institutions and arrangements meant to foster and safeguard pluralism in the United States. As Jan-Werner Mueller observed in his stellar book, What is Populism? 

In addition to being antielitist, populists are always antipluralist. Populists claim that they, and they alone, represent the people. Think, for instance, of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declaring at a party congress in defiance of his numerous domestic critics, “We are the people. Who are you?” Of course, he knew that his opponents were Turks, too. The claim to exclusive representation is not an empirical one; it is always distinctly moral. When running for office, populists portray their political competitors as part of the immoral, corrupt elite; when ruling, they refuse to recognize any opposition as legitimate. The populist logic also implies that whoever does not support populist parties might not be a proper part of the people—always defined as righteous and morally pure. Put simply, populists do not claim 'We are the 99 percent.' What they imply instead is 'We are the 100 percent.' 

When elections are free and fair, they pose a particular challenge to populist leaders and their followers. The vote may not reflect their illusory faith in their prevalence and legitimacy. Hence President Trump's barrage of pre-emptive warnings and post-election complaints about electoral fraud and rigged systems. These began at the outset of his rise to power in 2016 when he accused Ted Cruz of stealing a victory in the Iowa caucus. Later, he refused to follow Hillary Clinton in saying he would accept the results of the election. Afterward, affronted by the reality he had won with fewer popular votes than Clinton, Trump alleged he would have won a majority had it not been for three to five million illegal aliens who had voted for his opponent. 

We have seen the same pattern over the past year. President Trump repeatedly and baselessly asserted his opponents planned to engage in widespread voter fraud in the run-up to the election. He again refused to confirm in a pre-election debate that he would accept the results. And so, even after his defeat became incontrovertible, notwithstanding 60+ unsuccessful challenges in state and federal courts, he has rejected the outcome. Instead of conceding, the President, his campaign and party, and lawyers and supporters speaking on their behalf have resorted to increasingly wild-eyed conspiracy theories to explain his defeat. That each charge has proven groundless has only driven those leveling them, led by the President himself, further down the rabbit hole to maintain the falsehood he won the election. 

This pattern, too, is a natural outgrowth of populism. As Mueller observed about populists' inability to reckon with electoral defeat: 

The problem is never the populist's imperfect capacity to represent the people's will; rather, it's always the institutions that somehow produce the wrong outcomes. So even if they look properly democratic, there must be something going on behind the scenes that allows corrupt elites to continue to betray the people. Conspiracy theories are thus not a curious addition to populist rhetoric; they are rooted in and emerge from the very logic of populism itself.

 In this instance, the truth won out, and Joe Biden will become our 46th President on January 20th. However, President Trump's Big Lie that he won the election and the widespread belief he and his allies have stoked in it has brought the country to a foreboding threshold. For security reasons, 25,000 National Guard troops have been brought in to protect Biden’s inauguration, and the National Mall is closed to the public through January 21st. The FBI has warned officials in all 50 states to prepare for armed protests at their statehouses in the days before the inauguration. At least one armed group has plans to "storm" state capitols on the day itself. The overlapping and explosive mix of radicalized Trump supporters, Proud Boys, QAnon devotees, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, boogaloo bois, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and end-of-times Evangelicals that overran the Capitol is not going to fade away anytime soon.

Despite these troubling developments and the real possibility of renewed violence, I expect we will come to look back on January 2021 as a turning point rather than a point of no return in the backsliding of American democracy. Amid the tumult of the 2020 election, I see five harbingers of a renewed pluralism that lead me to be cautiously optimistic.

1) Congress refused to bow to the mob—and impeached the President for inciting it. The attempt to intimidate Congress, as fraught as it was, utterly failed. The House and Senate reconvened in their respective chambers that same evening and continued their work until they finished. Led by the Vice President, the Speaker, and the Senate Majority Leader, both houses proceeded to do their constitutional duty, explaining what they were doing, why, and how before the country. As Senator Mitt Romney declared in his speech,

We gather today due to a selfish man’s injured pride and the outrage of his supporters whom he has deliberately misinformed for the past two months and stirred to action this very morning. What happened here today was an insurrection, incited by the President of the United States. Those who choose to continue to support his dangerous gambit by objecting to the results of a legitimate, democratic election will forever be seen as being complicit in an unprecedented attack against our democracy. They will be remembered for their role in this shameful episode in American history. That will be their legacy.

Appropriately chastened, 7 of the 13 GOP Senators who had planned to object to counting states’ votes stood down. Both chambers rejected the objections raised by the feckless Republican legislators and validated Joe Biden's victory in the Electoral College.

Moreover, House members had already begun drafting a count of impeachment even as the riot was proceeding. The House impeached the President for an unprecedented second time one week later, with ten votes coming from the Republican side. Several GOP senators, including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have signaled they also think the President may be guilty of impeachable offenses. Our system of separation of powers presumes Congress will vigorously ward off presidential encroachments on its powers and, in the process, uphold the Constitution and the rule of law. Whatever the results of the Senate trial, Congress has done that in this charged instance.

2) A growing faction of reality-based Republicans is forcing a reckoning in their party. While most GOP legislators went along with President Trump's Big Lie after the election, not all of them did. After the results were clear on November 7th, Senators Romney and Ben Sasse and Representative Adam Kinzinger congratulated Biden on his victory and pledged to work with him in office. More importantly, in the weeks that followed, these legislators called out Trump's falsehoods about the election and how they ran counter to the Constitution and degraded our democracy. House GOP Conference Chair Liz Cheney shared a blistering 21- page memo with colleagues making these same points and urged them not to object to states' valid Electoral College votes. To highlight the hypocrisy of some of his fellow House Republicans', Chip Roy forced them to vote on whether they accepted the electoral results for their chamber, which they shamelessly did, from the same states many of them were planning to challenge at the presidential level.

In the aftermath of January 6th, Sasse has thrown down an even sharper gauntlet to his party, writing in the Atlantic,

The violence that Americans witnessed—and that might recur in the coming days—is not a protest gone awry or the work of "a few bad apples." It is the blossoming of a rotten seed that took root in the Republican Party some time ago and has been nourished by treachery, poor political judgment, and cowardice. When Trump leaves office, my party faces a choice: We can dedicate ourselves to defending the Constitution and perpetuating our best American institutions and traditions, or we can be a party of conspiracy theories, cable-news fantasies, and the ruin that comes with them….We cannot do both.

The factional fight Romney, Sasse, Cheney, Kinzinger, Roy, and a growing number of like-minded colleagues are waging within the GOP may not succeed, but the fact that it is now taking place is a promising sign. For pluralism to prosper, parties on both sides of the political spectrum need to defend the constitutional arrangements and political practices that enable it.

3) The integrity of our election systems and administrators held up under a climactic stress test. More than 159 million Americans cast a ballot in the November election – 23 million more than had voted in any previous election. The turnout rate of 66.7% of eligible voters was the highest in 120 years. The dramatic expansion in voting is even more remarkable, considering it occurred during a global pandemic that had killed 230,599 Americans by election day. Election administrators across the country managed to safely accommodate and enable the surge in participation via alternatives to in-person, election day voting. MIT's Election Data and Science Lab reports the proportion of ballots cast by mail more than doubled, spiking from 21% in 2016 to 46% in 2020. Early in-person voting also increased from 19% in 2016 to 26% in 2020. In the spring, as the pandemic began, election experts worried whether administrators could ramp up socially distanced voting by November. Nor was it obvious the decentralized U.S. election system could steel itself against the growing number of cyber threats from foreign and domestic actors. But the steady progress in bolstering our systems led to what Trump Administration officials described as "the most secure election in American history." That all of this worked out is a tribute to our election administrators' dedication and professionalism and the civil society organizations that helped them rise to the occasion.

Then there was the most significant stressor confronting our election system in 2020: the sustained and incendiary but ultimately baseless charges of widespread fraud from President Trump and his allies. Their lawsuits went nowhere and grew more risible as the weeks progressed. Even Attorney General William Barr, pressed by Trump to find and prosecute instances of widespread fraud, came back after looking into it and told the President that his allegations were “just bullshit.” In perhaps his most egregious assault on our democracy, President Trump repeatedly sought to pressure local and state election officials as well as the governors and legislators overseeing their work to overturn the results in contested states. These leaders, including notably several prominent Republicans, rebuffed the intruding weight of Trump’s presidency and the death threats of his supporters that followed its application.

None of this is to say we don't have plenty of work to do in continuing to buttress our system of free and fair elections. Indeed, the past few months have highlighted several vulnerabilities that need fixing, beginning with the Electoral Count Act of 1887. But the integrity and independence of our election system and those responsible for administering it, bulwarks of democracy and pluralism alike, held up in the face of a massive set of challenges, which bodes well for the future.

4) Technology companies are starting to take responsibility for how they impact our democracy. Populism and the conspiracy theories that undergird it flourish in the kudzu of social media. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter served as breakthrough technologies for Trump's 2016 campaign. In the White House, they have enabled Trump to commune with his followers and attack, intimidate, and belittle his opponents with unprecedented scale and reach. Realizing they needed to change their hands-off approach, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms came into the 2020 election cycle equipped with new policies and plans. They sought to counter foreign interference in our elections and slow, if not stop, the spread of disinformation by domestic actors intending to disrupt the vote. Facebook and Twitter took down groups and accounts that sought to undermine trust in the election, labeled false and misleading posts and tweets about the election process and results, made them harder to share, and pointed people toward authoritative sources of information. These steps brought them into increasing conflict with President Trump as he sought to erode public trust in the run-up to the election, and especially afterward when he sought to propagate the Big Lie that he had won it.

The violence on January 6th pushed the technology companies' response to Trump into new territory. Facebook announced "the risks of allowing President Trump to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great," so they suspended his accounts indefinitely. Twitter went further, permanently suspending @realDonaldTrump "due to the risk of further incitement of violence." Incensed by these moves, Trump's followers and aligned media elites accelerated their shift to Parler, the self-identified free speech and fact-check-free platform used by many of the January 6th rioters. But Apple and Google had already begun denying Parler use of their app stores, and Amazon its web hosting services, because of Parler’s rampant incitements to violence.

These dramatic steps made a big difference. One early assessment is reporting a 73% reduction in online disinformation about election fraud in the week after social media companies took them. It is entirely their right as private enterprises under the current regulatory regime to take these actions. No doubt the power these companies clearly hold in our democracy, and the way they have exercised it (or failed to) in the course of these episodes, will sharpen calls in Washington to revisit how they are regulated. Until then, however limited, inconsistent, or ham-fisted the tech companies’ responses have been, at least they are now attempting to protect the integrity of and trust in our elections. That is a start.

5) 81 million Americans voted to replace Donald Trump with Joe Biden. One sturdy feature of a healthy democracy is the ability to correct mistakes and remove leaders who govern contrary to most citizens' preferences. That Joe Biden secured seven million more votes than Donald Trump, a president whose Gallup job approval ratings never exceeded 50%, and fluctuated for most of his tenure between 37% and 45%, suggests this is what happened. The candidates presented voters with a clear choice. Biden ran as he had governed – as a moderate politician with reverence for our governing institutions after more than forty years of serving in them. A Senator for much of his life, Biden pledged to work with those who disagreed with him and to unite the country at a difficult moment. Trump also ran as he had governed – as a disrupter and divider, a man both scornful and wary of the governing institutions he ostensibly led. Trump's professional experience came as a real estate developer and a reality TV celebrity. He governed accordingly, acting on impulse and with braggadocio, a showman who kept his audience coming back for more with his non-stop confrontations and inflammation of their grievances. In short, 2020 was a race between an archetypal pluralist and populist. The pluralist won.

I have been struck by how unsatisfactory Biden's victory has felt to many who actively resisted Trump's populism, antipluralism, and conspiracy-mongering. After four years of wanting nothing more than to have President Trump gone, and after having their hopes to have that happen faster via investigations or impeachments dashed, they have finally gotten their wish. Still, the result feels precarious to them because 74 million of their fellow citizens – 11 million more than last time — voted for Trump. The 2020 election thus fell short of the landslide repudiation they sought. Now some hope for a conviction in Trump's second impeachment trial followed by a ban on future office-holding. Perhaps that will, at last, do the trick.

To me, this ambivalence mistakes the bedrock of our democracy and overlooks how it has held up. Confronted by a populist who has repeatedly sought to undermine our system of government, a majority of 81 million American voters – the largest in our history – voted for his opponent and removed him from office. In response to critics who argued the checks of the Constitution did not go far enough in guarding against corruption and misconduct, James Madison observed,

I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks--no form of government can render us secure.

For my part, reviewing the past four years and Joe Biden's election, I remain convinced the American people can elect leaders of virtue and wisdom. From here, we can build.

And make no mistake, we need to build. For all the resilience of Americans' civic virtue, we need replenishment – especially as we gird ourselves for the challenges that have recently surfaced and those that lie ahead. This replenishment can take place in part through politics, e.g., through statesmanship that seeks to unite rather than divide, even if it doesn't always succeed in doing so. But the bulk of the work must take place upstream of our politics, in our culture and communities, through civic education broadly construed, building bridges to those with whom we disagree, and refilling a drained well of social trust. Please stay tuned for more posts here at The Art of Association exploring how we can get from here to there.