“My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over,” Gerald Ford, newly installed as U.S. president, proclaimed on Aug. 9, 1974, after the resignation of his predecessor Richard Nixon. “Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men.”
“My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over,” Gerald Ford, newly installed as U.S. president, proclaimed on Aug. 9, 1974, after the resignation of his predecessor Richard Nixon. “Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men.”
Well, maybe. The conviction of one of Ford’s successors on 34 counts of falsifying business records seems as if it should be confirmation that nobody is above the law—a consolidation of the traditional interpretation that Watergate strained but ultimately reaffirmed the constitutional order. Yet the elite consensus in the hours after the verdict was pronounced took a more grimly realist—or even cynical—tone, with both convicted felon Donald Trump and a spokesperson for President Joe Biden agreeing that the real verdict would be delivered by voters in November.
Downplaying Trump’s conviction may make tactical electoral sense. Parsing the worldview of the handful of swing voters who will decide crucial states is no easy task, and ensuring they swing in the right direction is even more complicated.
Yet hoping the voters will sort it all out is not a useful governing philosophy for those who seek to revitalize U.S. institutions over the medium term. The expectation that institutions besides electoral politics should produce consequences for wrongdoing to which Ford’s statement appealed is a better guide not just to how Americans should want their institutions to operate but to how those institutions should operate.
Punting on accountability cannot be the basis for a lasting solution. Appealing to voters as a means of checking Trump assumes facts not in evidence—namely, that Trump respects the will of the voters at all. In neither of his campaigns to date has he won a majority of votes cast. Instead, he has sought to subvert their will on both occasions. In 2016, he accepted (and may have encouraged) assistance from elements linked to the Russian regime—and his conviction on Thursday stemmed from a separate form of election interference: paying hush money to avoid the release of damaging information during the campaign.
After voters cast their ballots in the 2020 election, Trump participated in (and may have led) efforts to overturn the popular mandate through chicanery in the Electoral College and, ultimately, by trying to thwart the legal counting of electors’ ballots.
Nor does Trump’s record in office suggest any great care for nurturing a thriving democracy. To the contrary, Trump’s election and first term weakened U.S. democracy. On all five of the indices measuring the quality of democracy tracked by the Varieties of Democracy project, Trump’s administration coincides with a reversal of U.S. democratic scores to levels not seen since the 1970s or even earlier.
The consequences of Trump’s election extended beyond U.S. borders. His administration dealt a significant blow to the country’s reputation and bolstered anti-democratic movements and oligarchic regimes around the world. A second term could well see Trump follow through on his oft-toyed-with idea of pulling out of NATO and, even more likely, reducing or ending U.S. assistance to Ukraine—both undermining the security of democratic regimes. And it seems unlikely that a second Trump administration would carry out specific pro-democratic measures, such as the Biden administration’s moves to protect Brazil’s democracy.
The current crisis of U.S. democracy, then, is a domestic struggle with global consequences. Alas, Trump is far from the only actor undermining U.S. democracy and liberal institutions. The disregard for judicial norms demonstrated by many members of the federal judiciary, including Supreme Court justices but lower court jurists as well, constitutes one strand of the threat. Many state governments have similarly adopted measures to restrict voting and other practices. Combined, these trends make explicit partisan gerrymandering more feasible than ever, compounding racial disparities in political power and weakening the accountability via the possibility of losing elections that ultimately motivates democratically elected politicians.
These conditions call for a more aggressive strategy. To make the world safe for democracy, pro-democracy officials must embrace a broader set of tactics to protect U.S. values at home. These include prioritizing the quality and integrity of the judiciary above secondary norms, such as the number of Supreme Court seats, but also employing tools from prosecutions to civil suits and beyond to investigate, publicize, and punish those who restrict or resist democratic processes and civil rights.
Without such moves to protect democracy, voters may not be able to make their voices count. That is one reason why prosecutions of actors like Trump matter: Election interference is not a technicality but a threat to the constitutional order.
Fifty years after Ford’s proclamation, then, the jury is out on whether U.S. institutions can protect democracy and hold elites accountable. If Trump is defeated in November, the work will have only begun. The culture of elite impunity that Trump symbolizes must be brought to an end.
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