Faith in Democracy

with John McWhorter

We cannot give in to paranoid fantasists who believe every election result that doesn’t go their way must be the result of a conspiracy and a cover-up. Neither can we treat reasonable attempts to tighten election security as wholesale violations of our civil rights. Our electoral system is, on the whole, very good, but it isn’t perfect. Over 150 million people cast ballots for the 2020 election. With that many people voting, and with each state running its own elections, something is virtually guaranteed to go wrong, even if it doesn’t affect the final outcome. We need to find a way to accept that even while guarding against it, and all without becoming either too disillusioned with our democracy or too cavalier about our elections.

Though I think the 2020 election was correctly called in favor of Joe Biden, the fact that so many people—most of whom are completely sane—believe something fishy went down is a bad sign for our democracy. Having secure elections means little if a significant group of people sincerely believes they aren’t secure. Our system requires from its participants a degree of trust, because it’s simply not possible to produce verifiable empirical evidence that every single vote was counted correctly. Without that trust, we would descend into chaos, with every election contested by the losing party and every officeholder regarded as illegitimate by a significant portion of the populace. In my opinion, we are edging far too close to that state of affairs.

“Election integrity” means more than securing the technical means of registering voters and counting votes. It also means securing the faith of the voters. Without that, our elections will become meaningless, as they are meaningless in nations where it’s common knowledge that ballot boxes are stuffed, voters are intimidated at the polls, and leaders regard the will of the people as a meek suggestion rather than an ironclad mandate. Even if our elections are basically secure as a technical matter, it may be worth instituting further security measures if they will help restore the faith necessary to a functioning democracy.

In this clip, John confronts me about my decision to talk about the 2020 election with Carol Swain, a political scientist of some distinction who also believes that Democrats stole the election from Trump. Though I disagree with her about that, I thought it was important to hear her out. Suppressing voices like hers will not make the doubts they express go away. In fact, suppression may even lead those doubts grow to the point where they crowd out faith entirely.

---

This is a clip from the episode that went out to paying subscribers on Monday. To get access to the full episode, as well as an ad-free podcast feed, Q&As, and other exclusive content and benefits, click below.

---

JOHN MCWHORTER: I must say to you, Glenn, and I think I'm expressing a feeling many people have, I am mystified that there can be a person with academic credentials and long experience as a public intellectual who actually believes that the 2020 election was stolen. You spoke to such a person.

GLENN LOURY: Do you think that Joe Biden won the election in 2020?

CAROL SWAIN: No, I think there were election irregularities. I believe that there were legitimate concerns.

So I do believe that the Democrats stole the election and the fact that they've criminalized saying that they stole the election and Facebook and Twitter and all of those social media platforms would kick you off if you publicly said that the election was stolen.

Including the platform we’re on, so watch yourself.

But I was stunned by that that person actually believes those things. I've been rattled by that for the past 48 hours, just trying to put myself into her head. I just wanted to say that, because it's on my mind. I don't get it. I don't understand. And it frustrates me when I can't even begin to understand.

Well, then I've accomplished my purpose. We're talking about Carol Swain, formerly a professor at Vanderbilt in the law school, as well as in the political science department. And prior to that, a tenured professor at Princeton in politics, author of many books. She's not a slouch by any means. She's a serious person.

I've accomplished my goal, which was not to further a conspiracy theoretic reasoning, but rather to illustrate how widespread her views—which I believe to be erroneous—are. She's not the only one who thinks this. If she can think this, many other people can think it as well. They don't trust the institution. They go to bed thinking that their guy’s won and they wake up in the morning and the thing has flipped and they assume some shenanigans had to go on. She had her various theories about that.

I was, in a way, anticipating blowback, and I got it in the comments and whatnot. People took the view, many of them, that you took. Some of them said, “I see where she's coming from, even though I think she's wrong.” Some of them said, “I think she's right.” But most of them said, “What?”

I want to also say, I'm not saying you shouldn't have spoken to her.

Okay. I appreciate that.

I'm just saying that I was flabbergasted. That really that blew my mind. And maybe that's good for me, but it really blew my mind.

Well, you know, Dinesh D'Souza—I know, he's Dinesh D'Souza—made a whole film. What do you call it, 2000 Mules or something like that? Some number of mules. And the mules were the people, you had these deposit boxes for the mail-in ballots that could be picked up and then brought en masse to the voting registry.

Dinesh D'Souza, though, has a bee in his bonnet. And maybe that's putting it too politely. Dinesh D'Souza is—I'm gonna say it, I'm sorry—he's an ideologue. He has an agenda, and facts can't in the way. It's like Giuliani at this point. Giuliani has clearly had some sort of slight mental break or maybe he's an alcoholic or something. With D'Souza, I'm not sure what it is, but he started out as a sane person with sane ideas and at some point kind of turned a corner. Carol Swain is not. That's why my mind was blown. It wasn't, okay, she's off the deep end, she's not capable of reasoning anymore. She is. It was very interesting to see that version of reasoning coming from her. Weird.

Now, suppose I were to say the following thing. Okay, the election was decided in 2020. Joe Biden won. He was certified. He's president of the United States. End of story. Two, Trump should have stepped aside when he exhausted his options in court, even if he thought that he was right and the courts were wrong and that he had been wronged in the election. Because there was no other legitimate way to proceed. If they stole it from him, they stole it fair and square, in the sense that, if they stole it from him, it was just stolen. There wasn't anything to be done about it. Better luck next time.

---

---

But. The “but” is what's wrong with having an election on election day? The pandemic was an extraordinary circumstance that we want to build into the structure of our election processes, the expedience that we availed ourselves of under those extraordinary circumstances because there are real issues about the security of the process.

If I have doubts about the integrity of the election, those are to be taken seriously, even if they're not based on fact, because enough people with doubts is itself a really deep problem for the legitimacy of the system and therefore calls for things like signature verification on mail-in ballots or a real ID to be presented when you cast the ballot or stuff like that—this is an old conversation for me and you—regardless of whether or not fraud is demonstrable, are themselves desirable things to the extent that they help to build people's confidence in the results when they come out and therefore that's something that we should consider seriously. And [we should] not attack people who want ballot security as being racist.

Yeah, I get your point. That alone is fine. But to use Giuliani talking points as defense of the idea that the election was stolen and not to engage with the rather conclusive refutations of those claims in widely available sources struck me as something I couldn't fit it into my sense of order.

It worries me going forward because of all these indictments of Trump. He may win, which is a problem in of itself. He may lose, which could be a problem in itself. Especially when you have local prosecutors bringing relatively weak cases against him, and it looks highly politically motivated and whatnot. And then people can say, if it's a razor-thin outcome and happens under those conditions, somebody put their thumb on the scale. “Lawfare” is what they call it now, using the law to wage warfare against your political opponents.

I worry. I mean, we can blame Trump because he did not accept the 2020 outcome, and he's let this thing loose in the land. I don't know if we get the genie back in the bottle. When Al Gore decided to step aside in 2000 with a stronger case than Trump might have been able ever to mount about how that election was inappropriately decided—they stopped recounting the ballots in Florida—he set one kind of precedent. Trump, when he fought on like he has done, has set another. And the reaction to Trump is setting precedents of its own. I don't know where this leads for us. It gives me the creeps.

---