When They Tell You What They Are, Believe Them

      In the United States, we vote our public officials into office.  In the Legislative and Executive branches, they serve fixed terms and then we take another whack at electing someone to the job -- maybe the same person, maybe someone new.

      Elections are fundamental to our system of government.  We have struggled over who gets to vote (originally just property-owing white men who had reached a certain age) and steadily expanded it to include all citizens (minus some categories of felons).  No elected office is a lifetime position.  While incumbents quite often get re-elected unless they've been very bad indeed, we can count on a chance to replace them with a new politician -- mind you, there's no promise the next one will be any better, but at least they'll be different.

      When the loser of a Presidential election posts on social media, “Do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,”* when there is no legal framework for it -- and no reason to believe "massive fraud" occurred in the 2020 Presidential election -- he is calling for the abrogation of the basic principles of our system of government.

      When the narrow loser of a gubernatorial election didn't simply call for a recount but filed a lawsuit full of extraordinary allegations (which we can safely presume will get their day in court) in which she calls for "An order setting aside the certified result of the 2022...election and declaring [she] is the winner...," that's well outside of the way elections really work in this country.

      So we should not be too surprised when a Claremont Institute Fellow puts forth,† as a serious position, that "even if conducted legitimately, elections no longer reflect the will of the people" and therefore the right should stop participating in "the technocratic accumulation of votes."

      Let's see -- people named winner by "declaration," demands that certified election results be set aside, claims that legitimate elections somehow fail to represent the will of the people, sneering at voting as mere "technocratic accumulation:" this isn't at all congruent with American democracy as it has been practiced for at least 233 years.  It's a goose-step match for autocracy, especially the more virulent forms of it that afflicted the 20th Century, most often under the banners of fascism and communism.

      Don't be hoodwinked.  These are people who exploit the anger and frustration voters often feel when their side loses.  The real solution is to get out there and do a better job in the next election.  This is the United States of America, where no elected office is a forever job and where we're on our sixth or seventh set of political parties, depending on how you score them.  Whining how it's all over and we ought to set ourselves up with a strongman or two -- or fifty-one of them -- is pernicious nonsense.
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* This was widely reported as Mr. Trump "calling for the termination of the Constitution."  While that would certainly be the effect, it looks to me more like a puffed-up version of a spoiled child of wealth demanding that any rules standing between him and what he wants should be put aside -- for him, and not for anyone else.  That's not how it works in this country, or at least not how it is supposed to work.  At the Constitutional level, it is most certainly not how things work.  This isn't browbeating a zoning board into letting you run up a casino in a residential neighborhood.
 
† I debated a direct link, but I'm of the opinion the article is poisonous sophistry and the author is just one more authoritarian propagandist, with a slicker line than most of his fellow-travelers.  "Hard Truths And Radical Possibilities;" you can do a web search for it but it says nothing about American democracy that the losing side in WW II didn't already say, right down to calling our votes mere "nose-counting."