The Real Threat to Democracy

with John McWhorter

Last week’s Iowa caucuses delivered the result that everyone predicted: Donald Trump crushed his competition. His lead in the polls is so overwhelming that you can hardly call this a “race” for the Republican nomination. Barring an act of God, Trump will cruise his way to the convention, while Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis vie for a very distant second-place finish. His likely nomination reflects the will of the vast majority of Republicans, whether they’re die-hard MAGA supporters, ambivalent voters who see Trump as the least-bad option, or something in between. Scores of millions of people are ready to pull the lever for him come November.

I can think of few more level-headed people than my friend John McWhorter. He’s nobody’s idea of an extremist. And yet, as you’ll see in this clip from our most recent Substack subscriber-only Q&A session, he’s willing to negate the will of all those millions of people in order to keep Trump off the general election ballot, as the state of Colorado is attempting to do. John is not alone. Plenty of otherwise reasonable people see preventing Trump from running in the general election as a step necessary to preserve the democracy they are sure that Trump threatens. And a comparable number see disqualifying him from the ballot as an illegitimate effort to influence the election’s outcome.

It’s all too easy to imagine a nightmare scenario where a small minority of armed Trumpers interfere with election day proceedings they feel to be illegitimate. John says, “Let the civil war happen.” I don’t think he and those who shrug at the possibility of violent civil unrest have really thought through what it could mean. The very foundations of our democracy would be thrown into question, and our country could descend to a state in which political violence was a regular feature of the evening news. That would be horrifying. Even more horrifying: Though the methods of these hypothetical armed resisters would be literally deplorable, it would be all too easy to understand their logic.

An election in which legal maneuvering keeps a candidate preferred by half (and maybe more than half) of the electorate off the ballot would not, in my view, be legitimate. It would not really be an election at all, and we are not ready for the consequences that would follow. It may be that Trump violated the Fourteenth Amendment. I don’t know. We should not have a president in office who was found to violate the Constitution. But we cannot have a president in office whose victory was secured not because he won an election but because there never really was one. For the country to be free of the threat Trump allegedly poses, he must be defeated in a free and fair election.

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This clip is taken from a subscriber-only Q&A session. For access to Q&As, comments, early episodes, and a host of other benefits, click below and subscribe.

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GLENN LOURY: This is from Joe.

Long time listener and big fan. Thank you for what you do. I don't mean to be unduly divisive, but his question relates to a topic that's been tangentially discussed several times, the 2020 election. Professor McWhorter likes to assert that the 2020 election wasn't quote stolen. While I agree that Biden won and the 2020 election wasn't stolen in the ways many of the more lunatic people claim—that is hacked servers, etc.—I can't help think that there was material and pervasive unfairness in the 2020 election. The unprecedented censorship alone certainly made it unfair and raises questions concerning what actually happened that we are prevented from being told.

My question is, even if we don't necessarily love the word “stolen,” can we all admit that the 2020 election contained deeply troubling manipulation, unfairness, and a lack of transparency perpetrated by big tech, the media, and several states.

JOHN MCWHORTER: How about this. I think Joe understands that even the sorts of things that he's talking about are not what motivate this lunatic fringe that we're talking about. And it's more than a fringe. And so if we're talking about trying to take over the Capitol, trying to arrest the election, thinking that something tragically dissimulatory has been foisted upon the Republic and that we're in a crisis, etc. I think that sort of person has no leg to stand on. And I've been, frankly, bemused how annoyed many people get when I say that.

I will not yield on this. The idea of—

I'm sorry, let me just ask. What is it that they have no leg to stand on? What is, in your view, obviously wrong?

The election was not stolen in some bald, absurd, nasty, incontestable way that justifies people taking up guns, justifies people thinking that we need to have a vast upending in procedure. No, all of that, I insist, is a kind of agitprop. It is a kind of—

But Joe didn't say that. Joe just asked, could we not acknowledge that there was an unusual environment? And don't you see the suppression of that as being problematic?

My answer to Joe is, haven't there been people saying that about pretty much every election over the past 200-plus years? It's just that we can talk more vividly about it now because of the nature of our communications technology. But was it worse last time than it was the time before or the time before? So yes, our whole election process is a mess. There are always these questions as to how representative of the national will the outcome was.

But the idea of there being an insurrection about it? I say no. And so do you. But you're saying, aren't there things that we could have been talking about more? Yeah, but I'm not sure if there weren't people who would have said that in 2000. I'm not sure if there weren't people saying that in 2004, etc. It's just for me, it's an issue of degree. Glenn, what do you think?

I think I agree with you. And Joe concedes the point that there weren't hacked voting machines or ballots that were stolen or people invented and their names were passed through with a voting register or whatever. We have no evidence of that. And there's no reason to believe that in the absence of evidence. And there's plenty of reason to not want to take that stance for the integrity of the system. I agree with that.

I think, though, there are elections and then there's after the election. And after the election, there's a question of the legitimacy and the extent to which it is broadly accepted and ratified by the populace. I think you're right to say that there are always questions, because the election and the ratification are two distinct events. And usually, under normal circumstances, there'll be insufficient suspicion, so that the one and the other will be the same.

Because you could raise questions. How are we going to conduct elections? What is going to be the role of mail-in balloting? What is going to be the role of early voting? You could really raise questions. You could be on one or the other side of that. And I think it's pretty clear that COVID-abetted irregularity or a modification of voting procedures disfavored Trump. I think his base is coming out. I want to say ballot harvesting, but I don't want to seem accusatory.

Changing the technology of mobilizing people and getting them to the polling place and getting them to cast their ballot probably is a move that expands the electorate in the direction that would disfavor Trump. So you could see why he would not want that to happen.

Yeah, but nothing radical happened .

What do you say about this Hunter Biden thing? They did suppress that story. They organized a letter from national security people that debunked it “as likely Russian propaganda,” and the tech people shut that story down. The New York Post's reporting, which was correct, about a consequential matter was suppressed. Now, if I'm sitting in Joe's seat, the feeling of unfairness is going to be hard to dispel.

The history of our republic is such—and Glenn, you know this much better than me—that we could have the same conversation about various things that the media did and didn't do in any election.

Let me ask you, do you think there are organized forces amongst elites and various important junctures of American public life, rabidly anti-Trump, who worked assiduously to affect the outcome of the election? Because we're talking about the legitimacy of the result. And we have a problem here in America, because a lot of people like Joe don't think the 2020 outcome passes the test of legitimacy, even though they may acknowledge that, as a legal jurisprudential matter, Joe Biden is the president of the United States. So is that anything that we should be concerned about going forward?

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Oh, sure. We should be concerned about it, but not in the sense that [it’s] a crisis junction. Because there were people who felt the same way about the election of 1960. The world kept spinning. This is the way these things go.

And the election of 2000.

Yeah. And here we are. I'm not saying that these things don't matter, but I'm just saying that anybody who is ready to turn the country upside down because of it—this is not Joe—but if you're ready to turn the country upside down, there's something wrong with you, I think.

Here's where we are, John. Donald Trump is running for president again, and he's under a criminal indictment in multiple jurisdictions. And his ballot legitimacy is being questioned at the level of several states. I'm not sure exactly what my question is for you. I merely want to call attention to the fact that the legitimacy mechanism is in grave jeopardy.

Suppose you actually were able to disqualify Trump from some ballots, and Biden were to win the election in a narrow electoral college and popular vote. That's a disaster for our country. I worry about that very deeply, because Joe is probably being nice and polite in the way he states his question. This is a problem. It's a problem of the legitimacy of our electoral processes.

The question as to how legitimate it is to disqualify Trump is one that has to be thought over. My feeling about it is, that is a legitimate decision. Roughly, there'd be no reason that the founders would have disincluded the president from what they were saying. It's not ideally worded. It would make no sense if they thought the president was the exception.

The question is whether January 6th was an insurrection of the character that the Fourteenth Amendment was motivated by. That's the question. The question is whether Donald Trump incited an insurrection against the government of the United States of such a nature that he should be disqualified from serving in office. That's the question. And I'm just going to go out on a limb and say we must not answer that question “yes.” We must not do that. That's a threat to democracy.

They were trying to hold up the procedure. The idea was to hold up what was going on inside of that building.

But you're not following me. Excuse me, I apologize, but I don't think I'm making myself clear. I am not asking that question. I'm asking a question about the legitimacy machine. And regardless of the factual truth or falsity of the question of did he incite an insurrection, he must not, I assert and invite your rebuttal, be disqualified from the ballot on that ground. That will destroy this country.

And if that's the way it has to go, as far as I'm concerned, let it. Maybe we need that.

So you don't dispute what I'm saying, you're just willing to live with that outcome? Am I wrong to say that is a destruction of the legitimacy machine? No matter what the outcome of the election, it will not be legitimate if you do that, and that's a disaster for the country. That's the position.

I know that there are many people who will think that it wasn't legitimate, and they might come out, finally, with their guns. You can't face this decision on being afraid of them, right? Or am I misunderstanding you?

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No, you're not. You can base this decision on being afraid of them. That is exactly what I'm saying. Don't go there. I'm saying, don't die on that hill. That's a mistake. To deal with this guy, you have to beat him in an election. You can't peremptorily disqualify him, because there are scores of millions of people who support him. You have to actually win the election. That's what I'm saying. Otherwise you do grave damage to the institutions.

Uh-uh. I'm going to be crazy here and say, let the civil war happen. We cannot make this decision based on those...

So let's agree to disagree. You want to move on it? 'Cause if you want to say more, go ahead and say more, but I've said my piece.

Are you really interested in kowtowing to those morons?

Oh God, John.

Those melodramatic ... you okay?

My crown came off. I just pressed it back on. I'm gonna have to get some adhesive in a moment, but fortunately it slotted right back in. So I'm good.

I'm sorry.

No, man. You call them morons? That is such a mistake. I don't want to get personal about it, but...

All right. You're right. “Morons” was wrong. And I didn't mean it. I don't think they're morons. I sometimes like to use dramatic language. But I do think this. They are caught up in a melodramatic, self-affirming kind of group membership, which does not correspond with reality and it cannot be allowed. We can't base our decisions on that.

No, they simply support Donald Trump for president of the United States. That's not a cult. That's a small businessman in a mid-sized town in Ohio. That's an evangelical Christian in Louisiana. That's a working-class, union-dues-paying resident of Detroit, Michigan.

But the subset of those who believe in Giuliani's claims and really think the wool has been pulled over our eyes in that sense? I'm sorry, no. Most Trump supporters don't think that way, I know.

You are pathologizing your political opponent.

Some of them.

You are pathologizing them. You're not asking about the border. You're not asking about the war in Ukraine. You're not asking about the economic agenda. Man ...

It's the fantasists.

The following here is not simply based on the personality of the individual. There are deep forces in American political life that are at play.

I agree.

You can't let the Democratic Party continue to set the agenda for the country without having an election. And if you preemptively disqualify this guy, that's exactly what you would be doing.

But it would be based on legal doctrine that was not crafted even with him in mind. Maybe he shouldn't be running. He tried to break the country in two. That's not an unreasonable argument.

Okay, he brought us to this point, and January 6th happened. We know how people feel about that. They impeached him twice. And his ego and his inflammatory rhetoric and his transphobia and his damage to the institutions. He's a bad guy. Trump bad.

I'm not buying that. I think he is a phenomenon to be understood in the context of the forces that produced him. Now, look at what's happening in the country. The Supreme Court. There's a reaction against the leftward drift that is simmering. Look at this debate about the Middle East, about Ukraine.

All of that should be represented by some Republican other than that—and this time I am going to say it—malevolent moron. He should not be the one who channels these very legitimate grievances. The ones that you're talking about are important. But not that man.

And the way that man is is not what's motivating my saying he should be disqualified. I didn't have the legal expertise to anticipate this whole discussion until it came about. But it's not that I don't like him. He could be a kind of a likable, legalistic, intelligent person, and still, if there were a case that he had tried to break the country in two, I would be behind it.

Glenn, how come it has to be him? Wouldn't you rather Nikki Haley or Chris Christie?

It is him. No, I'm not going to get into that. I'm not a Republican, man. I'm not going to get into parsing these candidates. It is him. That's my point. It is him. Like I said, there's him and there are the historical forces that produced him. Those forces are what they are.

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