What Makes Trump’s
Subversion Efforts So Alarming? His Collaborators
The president
has been trying to dismantle our shared beliefs about democracy. And now, his
fellow Republicans are helping him.
By Henry J. Farrell and Bruce Schneier
Mr.
Farrell is a professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins. Mr. Schneier
is a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School.
- Nov. 23, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET
Last Thursday,
Rudy Giuliani, a Trump campaign lawyer, alleged a widespread voting conspiracy involving Venezuela,
Cuba and China. Another lawyer, Sidney Powell, argued that Mr. Trump won in a landslide, the entire
election in swing states should be overturned and the legislatures should make
sure that the electors are selected for the president.
The Republican
National Committee swung in to support her
false claim that Mr. Trump won in a landslide, while Michigan election
officials have tried to stop the certification of the vote.
It is wildly
unlikely that their efforts can block Joe Biden from becoming president. But
they may still do lasting damage to American democracy for a shocking reason:
The moves have come from trusted insiders.
American
democracy’s vulnerability to disinformation has been very much in the news
since the Russian disinformation campaign in 2016. The fear is that outsiders,
whether they be foreign or domestic actors, will undermine our system by
swaying popular opinion and election results.
This is half
right. American democracy is an information system, in which the
information isn’t bits and bytes but citizens’ beliefs. When peoples’ faith in
the democratic system is undermined, democracy stops working. But as
information security specialists know, outsider attacks are hard. Russian
trolls, who don’t really understand how American politics works, have actually
had a difficult time subverting it.
When you
really need to worry is when insiders go bad. And that is precisely what is
happening in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. In traditional
information systems, the insiders are the people who have both detailed
knowledge and high level access, allowing them to bypass security measures and
more effectively subvert systems. In democracy, the insiders aren’t just the
officials who manage voting but also the politicians who shape what people
believe about politics. For four years, Donald Trump has been trying to dismantle
our shared beliefs about democracy. And now, his fellow Republicans are helping
him.
Democracy
works when we all expect that votes will be fairly counted, and defeated
candidates leave office. As the democratic theorist Adam Przeworski puts it, democracy
is “a system in which parties lose elections.” These beliefs can break down
when political insiders make bogus claims about general fraud, trying to cling
to power when the election has gone against them.
It’s obvious
how these kinds of claims damage Republican voters’ commitment to democracy.
They will think that elections are rigged by the other side and will not accept
the judgment of voters when it goes against their preferred candidate. Their
belief that the Biden administration is illegitimate will justify all sorts of
measures to prevent it from functioning.
It’s less
obvious that these strategies affect Democratic voters’ faith in democracy,
too. Democrats are paying attention to Republicans’ efforts to stop the votes
of Democratic voters — and especially Black Democratic voters — from being
counted. They, too, are likely to have less trust in elections going forward,
and with good reason. They will expect that Republicans will try to rig the
system against them. Mr. Trump is having a hard time winning unfairly, because
he has lost in several states. But what if Mr. Biden’s margin of victory
depended only on one state? What if something like that happens in the next election?
The real fear
is that this will lead to a spiral of distrust and destruction. Republicans —
who are increasingly committed to the notion that the Democrats are committing
pervasive fraud — will do everything that they can to win power and to cling to
power when they can get it. Democrats — seeing what Republicans are doing —
will try to entrench themselves in turn. They suspect that if the Republicans
really win power, they will not ever give it back. The claims of Republicans like Senator Mike Lee of Utah that
America is not really a democracy might become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
More likely,
this spiral will not directly lead to the death of American democracy. The U.S.
federal system of government is complex and hard for any one actor or coalition
to dominate completely. But it may turn American democracy into an unworkable
confrontation between two hostile camps, each unwilling to make any concession
to its adversary.
We know how to
make voting itself more open and more secure; the literature is filled with vital and important suggestions. The more
difficult problem is this. How do you shift the collective belief among
Republicans that elections are rigged?
Political
science suggests that partisans are more likely to be persuaded by
fellow partisans, like Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state in
Georgia, who said that election fraud wasn’t a big problem. But this
would only be effective if other well known Republicans support him.
Public
outrage, alternatively, can sometimes force officials to back down, as when
people crowded in to denounce the Michigan Republican election officials who were
trying to deny certification of their votes.
The
fundamental problem, however, is Republican insiders who have convinced
themselves that to keep and hold power, they need to trash the shared beliefs
that hold American democracy together.
They may have
long-term worries about the consequences, but they’re unlikely to do anything
about those worries in the near-term unless voters, wealthy donors or others
whom they depend on make them pay short-term costs.
Henry Farrell (@henryfarrell) is a
professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced
International Studies. Bruce Schneier (@schneierblog)
