What Will You Do if Trump Doesn’t Leave?
Playing
out the nightmare scenario.
By David Brooks
Opinion
Columnist
·
Sept. 3, 2020, 7:46 p.m. ET
On the evening of Nov. 3, Americans settle
nervously in front of their screens to await elections results. In the early
hours Donald Trump seems to be having an excellent night. Counting the votes
cast at polling places, Trump is winning Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.
Those states don’t even begin
processing mail-in ballots until Election
Day, yet Trump quickly declares victory. So do many other Republican
candidates. The media complains that it’s premature, but Trumpworld is
ecstatic.
Democrats know that as many as 40
percent of the ballots are mail-in and
still being counted, and those votes are likely to be overwhelmingly
for Joe Biden, but they can’t control the emotions of that night. It’s a gut
punch.
As the mail-in
ballots are tallied, the Trump leads erode. But the situation is genuinely
unclear. Trump is on the warpath, raging about fraud.
Within weeks there are lawsuits and
challenges everywhere. It’s like Florida in 2000, but the chaos is happening in
many states at once. Ballots are getting tossed because of problems with
signatures, or not getting tossed, amid national frenzy.
Trump says he won’t let Democrats steal
the election and declares himself re-elected. It’s an outrage, but as when he
used the White House for a campaign prop during his convention, who’s going to
stop him?
A certain kind of Republican takes to
the streets to enforce Trump’s version of events. According to research done by Larry Bartels of Vanderbilt, 50
percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents believe “the
traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to
use force to save it.” Nearly as many believe, “A time will come when patriotic
Americans have to take the law into their own hands.”
The left is in the streets, too. On the
fringe of the left there are those who want to overthrow the racist,
cisgendered, patriarchal neoliberal oligarchy. This is their chance at mayhem,
too, and they seize it with sometimes violent passion.
But a new force looms
into view. For the whole Trump era a certain sort of conservative has been
cowering from the Trump onslaught. Certain sorts of moderates and liberals have
also been keeping their heads down, so they won’t get bitten off by the woke
mobs. But now the very existence of the Republic is at stake.
It turns out, amid the existential
crisis, there really is a group of sober people who are militant about America,
who can see reality unblinkered by the lens of partisanship, and who are
finally compelled to organize.
They understand that, like so many
American tragedies, this is largely about race. It’s about the transition from
a certain kind of white-dominated America to a diverse America — and the people
who will do anything to stop it.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once
argued that sin is buried so deep in the human soul that sweet words are
insufficient to get people to give up their unjust power. “Instead of assured
progress in wisdom and decency,” he wrote, “man faces
the ever-present possibility of a swift relapse not merely to animalism, but
into such calculated cruelty as no other animal can practice.”
But the realist militants who walk in
King’s shadow also know that it is the U.S. Constitution that keeps us from
slipping into chaos, along with all the norms and values built around it over
the centuries. They know, too, that this crisis is not just about race, but
also the greatness of American institutions, so scorned and derided of late, so
neglected and abused.
If Trump claims a victory that is not
rightly his, a few marches in the streets will not be an adequate response. There
may have to be a sustained campaign of civic action, as in Hong Kong and
Belarus, to rally the majority that wants to preserve democracy, that isolates
those who would undo it.
Two themes would have to feature in
such civic action. The first is ardent patriotism. The country survives such a
crisis only if most people’s love of nation overwhelms the partisan fury that
will threaten to envelop us.
The second is the
preservation of constitutional order. Through epic acts of self-discipline, the
nonviolent civil rights marchers in the 1960s forced their foes to reveal that
if there were to be any violence and anarchy, it would come from the foes. That’s
how the movement captured the moral high ground and won the mind of the nation.
The process of mobilizing for an
accurate election outcome, before it is too late, would be a struggle to
preserve the order of our civic structure against the myriad foes who talk
blithely about tearing down systems, disorder and disruption. It may be how we
rediscover our nation again.
It’s time to start thinking about what
you would do.
