“History walks on the bad side,” wrote Frederick Engels, and there is a famous Murphy’s Law that if something bad can happen, it will happen. In recent years, history has walked on the wrong side for U.S. democracy. And the bad that happened to it happened to be Donald Trump.
I am writing at 3 p.m. on Nov. 3, before I even know the results of the presidential election. Nothing has fundamentally changed in the favorable trend toward Joe Biden, but I write today with greater uncertainty about the outcome than I had two weeks ago.
Trump managed to cast a menacing shadow of conflict and uncertainty over the course of an election, with obvious effects. Americans began yesterday fearful of learning the results of an election that, with another president, would have been routine.
The president turned it into a sort of street fight of undetermined outcome, where the winner will fight tooth and nail in the fray, and citizens will have the option of landing their own blows on citizens in the opposing party.
The twists and turns of the U.S. electoral system, with its undemocratic Electoral College — which allows for winning without obtaining the majority — is the mechanism that once again calls into question the quality, representation and institutional stability of the U.S. democracy. But the most vicious barrier has been Trump, an anomaly of a president who threatened to not accept the results and to spend weeks discrediting the process so he could ignore it.
At 3:30 in the afternoon when I write this column, I believe that his entire back-alley lawsuit will fail and that the same democracy that brought Trump to the presidency will kick him out of it.
I believe that, as the polls predict, Biden will win on election night or in the days that follow.
I believe that at the end of this battle, there will be that breath of fresh air that encourages democracy in the United States and throughout the world. We shall see.
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