American democracy could emerge stronger after Donald Trump’s assault

The 2020 US election saga has entered the phase where little-known local officials are suddenly thrown into international stardom. During the 2000 setback, that person was Katherine Harris, the Florida Secretary of State whose not-so-subtle finger on the recount scales helped hand the White House over to George W. Bush. Now it’s Brad Raffensperger’s turn.

Mr. Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State, gained fame for publicly censoring allies of President Donald Trump who pressured him to play with the ballots in his state, which Joe Biden won by nearly 13,000 votes. But Mr. Raffensperger represents something else, something more important: proof that American government institutions are still alive and functioning.

The arrival of Mr. Raffensperger on the national scene – along with other travelers like Matthew Brann, a

Read my statement on today’s Pennsylvania federal court decision, and congratulating President-Elect Biden: https://t.co/tCCXWxIUoR pic.twitter.com/MaxfHCtK1x

— Pat Toomey (US Sen. ret.) (@SenToomey) November 22, 2020

who over the weekend scornfully dismissed Mr Trump’s attempt to stop Pennsylvania from certifying its results – was timed by chance. The mood in Washington has darkened.

For two weeks, Mr. Trump’s tongue-in-cheek attempt to overturn the November 3 election results was treated with barely concealed ridicule, even among close aides, who saw the effort as a bit of humor the sulky president .

But Mr. Trump is no longer content to cover the country’s courts with frivolous lawsuits. Its troop withdrawals risk rekindling anti-coalition violence in Afghanistan; its reduction in the US Federal Reserve’s pandemic rescue funds could cause the economy to stop contracting; and, perhaps most alarmingly, its attempts to falsify the selection of presidential voters in battlefield states threaten the very legitimacy of the democratic process.

Governance and institutional legitimacy are among the most lackluster of all political science. But anyone who has spent time in a failed state, or even in a dysfunctional developed country, can attest to how fleeting trust in government institutions can be.

It is something that most Americans have never considered. It’s a blind spot that has at times had fatal consequences for American politics, such as when the Bush administration sent thousands of well-meaning trainers and bureaucratic experts to Iraq to recreate a functioning state from the rubble of the United States. war. A generation of Iraqis mistreated by Saddam Hussein’s security apparatus were not so easily persuaded by seasoned Republican political operatives that they could once again trust government institutions.

You don’t have to travel to a war zone to see how difficult it is to restore the credibility of government institutions once trust is lost. A senior European finance official once told me that this is the fundamental difference between France and Italy, two economies of similar size with equally proud histories. The French have confidence in their institutions and in the functions of the State; Italians do not trust their government and the state is going from crisis to crisis.

The fear in Washington is that the United States is quickly approaching its Italian moment. Mr Trump appears so determined to destroy trust in US government institutions – the courts, the FBI, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – that the United States could cease to be a functioning state, let alone a model for the world. Steve Bannon, who still remains the closest thing to an intellectual touchstone for Trumpism, has never hidden that his real goal in supporting Mr. Trump was the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”

But what if the reverse is true? What if Mr. Raffensperger proved the rule rather than the exception? The most likely course of the next two months is that the courts continue to reject Mr. Trump’s savage conspiracy theories, that local authorities complete their electoral certifications as they did in Michigan on Monday, that troops respect their oath to the constitution rather than any individual. , and that Mr. Biden was sworn in as president on January 20 without incident.

In other words, the American institutions that were put in place to protect the state from the authoritarian impulses of a president like Mr. Trump will have functioned exactly as they were designed. They will have performed admirably against the gravest threats: a sitting US president, with all the powers the office commands, mounting a frontal assault on their foundations.

Despite all the shame the next two months may bring to Mr. Trump, American institutions may well emerge with a new appreciation from the American public. They learn that their bureaucracies are filled with decent officials like Mr. Raffensperger. Rather than the beginning of the end, this would be their best time. And a grateful nation would have all the Raffensperger out there to thank.

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