American election ‘deniers’ reveal just how precarious our democracy’s future remains

Declarations that democracy won in the midterms are hyperbolic. Election denialism remains disturbingly strong. Losing election-denier/questioner candidates for governor, attorney general and secretary of state garnered between 41.8% at the low end to 50% at the high end of votes in four swing states, constituting a total of around 12 million voters. In Georgia, 48.5% voted for Senate candidate Herschel Walker; 48% for Adam Laxalt in Nevada. Some 150 election deniers have been re-elected or newly elected to the House.

In various forms with various intensity, “deniers” have dogged the nation from Patrick Henry’s urging Virginia to reject the new Constitution, stating “They’ll free your n….s, ” to Abraham Lincoln in 1860 garnering 1,866,452 votes compared with the combined 2,823,741 votes for the three candidates running against him, to the 44.9% that voted for a slavery-tolerant candidate over Lincoln in 1864, to the 19th and 20th century Ku Klux Klan, to the post-Civil War election to Congress of violent Southerners like Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman, who boasted on the Senate floor that there was no shame in shooting Blacks and stuffing ballot boxes to prevent “Negro domination.”

Fortunately, the majority of Americans have agreed with George Washington when he declared in his first inaugural address that the “sacred fire of liberty” and our form of republican democracy were staked, perhaps as their last hope, “on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.” For Lincoln, the experiment would end if losers of national elections could simply reject the Constitution and leave the Union.

In her recent concession speech, Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney noted that after the brutal Civil War Battle of the Wilderness, General Ulysses S. Grant, unlike other Union generals, did not retreat north, but continued south toward Richmond. She noted that his soldiers watched intently to see if he would turn his Army south. She omitted that when they saw Grant turn southward, they cheered. There were many more brutal battles ahead, but the national experiment was preserved.

A susceptible portion of our people, who perhaps through no fault of their own, were never taught or learned the basics of American civics and history — never learned that with freedom comes responsibility, or else citizens can become a mob.

Despite what Washington called the “horrid enormities” of dictatorship — so apparent in the histories of various Roman emperors, Hitler, Mussolini, Putin and a host of others — the mob can be convinced that our institutions are failing, that a dictatorship of the left looms, and that only a dictatorship of the right can save the nation.

Fearing they are out to replace them and take their guns, the mob is easily stirred up against the so-called godless libs, elites, weaklings, smart-alecks, immigrant horde, and growing minorities. The mob is susceptible to rising anger when a lawful search of a former president’s home is denounced with inflammatory language like “fascist,” “rogue,” “gestapo,” “banana republic,” “planted evidence,” “third world,” and “coming for you,” all obviously capable of triggering violence. Much more of such language can likely be expected when lawful indictments/convictions come.

The majority of Americans, our institutions, our ideals, our law enforcement, and our military are the antidote to the mob. For more than 240 years, Americans have periodically fought for, died for, and maintained our experiment. But complacency fuels “deniers.”

In 1877, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat editorialized about the North’s resignation in the face of the South’s relentless violent defiance of Reconstruction and racial equality: “the untiring hate of … Southerners has worn out our endurance, and … though we staked everything for freedom under the spur of the rebellion, we have not enough principle about us to uphold the freedom, so dearly bought, against the persistent and effective opposition of the unrepentant and unchanged rebels.” Former Confederate Gen. Wade Hampton, as South Carolina’s governor, described the North as “suckers” for accepting in 1877 the South’s assurances of equal treatment for Blacks in return for removing the military in connection with the deal that resolved the presidential electoral deadlock in favor of Rutherford B. Hayes.

Midterm results that were favorable to democracy do not change that our democracy remains at historically high risk. Our democracy will prevail as long as the cheers of Grant’s troops define us.

Daniel O. Jamison is a retired attorney in Fresno.