Quite a few Trump-backed candidates have won Republican primaries. They are all election-deniers, that is, they push the debunked claims about electoral fraud, and they consider Biden’s victory to be illegitimate.
Can a democracy – even the world’s leading one – make itself safe against its voters and the politicians they elect?
Written by Sanjib Baruah
Updated: August 25, 2022 5:58:39 am
“These are dark times for our nation”. This was the deceptive but perhaps unwittingly accurate opening line of the email that former president Donald Trump wrote earlier this month telling the world about the search of his home in Palm Beach, Florida by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “My beautiful home”, he said, “is currently under siege, raided and occupied by a large group of FBI agents. Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before”.
The FBI action was not a “raid”; it was the lawful execution of a search warrant. The search was in connection with a criminal investigation of classified White House documents that Trump apparently took to Florida when he left office. The investigation has been going on for months; the decision to seek a search warrant from a federal magistrate was made only after efforts to get the material using less invasive methods had failed.
Once upon a time, most Americans would have welcomed such a move to enforce the law. It would have been taken as a sign of the health of their democracy, a validation of the American ideal that no one is above the law. But these are not normal times. The news of the “FBI raid” sparked anger among Trump supporters and his allies in the media. The rhetoric of violence escalated in pro-Trump online forums. Republican politicians, including contenders for the party’s nomination for president in 2024, quickly rallied around Trump. His reelection prospects shot up.
Trump, a master at shaping media conversations, lost no time to gain the upper hand in shaping the narrative. That the FBI or the Justice Department — under which the FBI operates — does not as a rule discuss ongoing investigations, gave him an opening. Trump, or his lawyer who was present at his home during the search, could have made public the search warrant and the list of items that was seized. This they did not do.
Instead, Trump politicised the search to appeal to his loyal followers who continue to repeat his false claim that he was fraudulently denied re-election. Nowhere in his lengthy email did Trump add the adjective “former” before president to refer to his present status.
By the end of the week, following a Justice Department request, a federal judge unsealed the documents related to the search. Now we know that the warrant was issued because of possible serious violations of the Espionage Act and laws governing official secrets. The seized documents include some categorised as so secret and sensitive because of potential damage to national security, that they were to be viewed only in a secure government facility.
Yet, Trump called the FBI search “the weaponisation of the Justice System”, and a desperate attempt by Democrats to stop him from running for president. “The establishment”, he said conspiratorially, was trying to stop him now because of a string of victories of pro-Trump candidates in Republican primaries, and opinion polls showing that Republicans will make gains in the November mid-term elections, and others showing that Trump would beat Joe Biden in a hypothetical rematch in 2024.
It is indeed remarkable that nearly two years after Biden won, in the face of all contrary evidence and multiple failed legal attempts to challenge the outcome, many Republicans continue to say that the last presidential election was rigged. Quite a few Trump-backed candidates have won Republican primaries. They are all election-deniers, that is, they push the debunked claims about electoral fraud, and they consider Biden’s victory to be illegitimate. The latest and most significant among them is Harriet Hageman, who overwhelmingly defeated Representative Liz Cheney, who became a target of Trump’s ire because of her highly visible role as vice chair of the congressional panel investigating the attack on the Capitol on January 6 last year.
The US homeland security bureaucracy uses the terms “violent extremism” or “domestic terrorism” to describe political violence perpetrated by American citizens inside the country. However, the use of these terms for the January 6 events has proved controversial. Many Republican politicians call the violent protesters “peaceful patriots”.
Domestic terrorism or violent extremism may be useful terms for policing agencies. But they don’t explain the support and sympathy for the insurrectionists among large sections of the people including Republican members of Congress. For that it may be rewarding to turn to a constellation of beliefs, values, and political attitudes that has come to be called “white Christian nationalism”. Christian in this usage is an identity category; it is not about faith or church attendance. The “we” in this worldview consists of white, native-born, and culturally Christian Americans.
In their recent book The Flag and the Cross, sociologists Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry suggest that white Christian nationalism is a significant driver of the support for Trump, his rhetoric of resentment, and his authoritarian and anti-democratic impulses. It is no accident that Christian symbolism and icons of American patriotism and of white supremacy were on full display at the January 6 Capitol siege. These apparently contradictory symbols stand in for different facets of white Christian nationalism.
The Flag and the Cross provides clues to why the stolen election myth has been so resilient. White Christian nationalists make a distinction between people they view as “real Americans” and those that are not. Since “real Americans” voted for Trump, official results showing that he lost can only be the product of manipulation and fraud. The geography of voting patterns helps reinforce this belief. Detailed maps of poll results suggest that many Republican voters live in communities that are almost entirely Republican. To people who may not know a single person who voted for Biden — and don’t trust the institutions of election administration in other jurisdictions — a Biden victory may indeed seem suspicious.
These are dark times for democracy. The last few weeks in American politics raise a deeper question: Can a democracy — even the world’s leading one — make itself safe against its voters and the politicians they elect?
The writer is professor of Political Studies at Bard College, New York