Peaceful Transfers
Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with a student who is from Turkey. He told of how unsettled he and his friends felt, watching from afar, as an insurrectionist mob, supporters of President Trump, descended on the Capitol on January, 6, 2021, in an attempt to disrupt the certification of the presidential election. His own country has had a fraught history with democracy. Turkey’s recent past offers a whole host of examples of disrupted democracy and struggles over power outside the electoral process. As recently as 2016, Turkey witnessed an unsuccessful military coup. Responding to the coup, the country’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, took a turn in an authoritarian direction. Among other actions, Erdoğan and his supporters abolished the office of Prime Minister in order to consolidate power into the office of President. This student and his friends were thus no strangers to the fragility of democracy. But the assumption has always been that these kinds of things happen in countries not long steeped in democracy; it is not supposed to happen in the United States, the nation that thwarted the age of monarchical empire by forging the flagship modern republic. The scenes of the siege on January 6th were thus disturbing and confusing.
How, he asked, is a peaceful transfer of power supposed to go? What is it supposed to look like?
I found myself halting in answering this question. I tried to walk through the process–the timeline of the election, the process of counting and certifying ballots, legal challenges, the meeting of the Electoral College, and the certification by Congress in early January. I spoke of the long line of largely uncontested elections, of times when supporters may have protested peacefully against the outcome of an election. I told the story of Al Gore’s concession in 2000, and his act of patriotism in overseeing the certification of his loss in an election that many felt was dubious, partly due to the Supreme Court’s intervention and partly because Gore had won the popular vote.
Source: United States National Archives
But the truth is that, while power has nearly always been transferred peacefully, and while the sacking of the Capitol in 2021 was without precedent (barring that of the British Army in 1814), presidential elections have not always been smooth. Some were hotly contested after that balloting had ended. Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860 was so soundly rejected in the slave South that many states voted to secede from the Union (and elect their own president) long before Lincoln took the oath of office in March of the following year. The election of 1877 was so badly corrupted that it required an arguably extra-Constitutional bargain in Congress just to seat a president. The 1824 election ended with no candidate receiving an electoral college majority; while Congress followed the process outlined in the Constitution for such an outcome, their final vote in favor of John Quincy Adams over Andrew Jackson, who had won the popular vote, tainted Adams’ presidency with an illegitimacy driving what was purported to be a “corrupt bargain.” (Additionally, voting in America more broadly has seen violence more often than most of us would like to admit, especially aggression aimed at black Americans who have sought to exercise their voting rights.)
Generally, though, the transfer of the powers of the presidency, while always marked by some disappointment and even some bitterness on the part of the losing side, has largely taken place without a high degree of discord, and without violence. Certainly we had never seen anything like what unfolded on January 6th, 2021. Partly this is due to a lengthening tradition of electoral processes conveying a kind of cumulative confidence in their reliability. But it is also owing to a very practical geopolitical consideration: America’s presidential elections have held in part due to a desire not to communicate to the world anything other than a full-throated commitment to the norms and rules of democracy, for to do so would be to signal to its enemies that the US was not as strong as it purported to be. We can see this distinctly in the vanquished presidential candidate concession speeches once the outcome has become clear. George H. W. Bush, Hubert Humphrey, Gerald Ford, Bob Dole, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon (yes, even)–the list of defeated candidates in the modern (post-WWII era) who concluded their campaigns with a call to unity, a plea for healing, and a commitment to the peaceful transfer of power was unbroken. This pattern ended with the 2020 election.
The words and actions of those candidates in those moments were no mere gestures; they did this because they knew that the passions they had stirred in the campaign needed to be directed toward the shared work of democratic governance. And they knew that if they did not lead that process, those passions could be put to disruptive ends.
Fortunately, Americans need not rely solely on the gracious concession of the loser in a presidential election to safeguard a peaceful transfer of power and the maintenance of a free and fair democracy following the election. Viewed broadly, democracy is fairly inefficient. It takes a great deal for a democratic government to act, and railing against gridlock in Washington is perhaps the most popular of sports in American politics. But gridlock is not a bug in the system; it is a feature. The American system diffuses power among local, state, and federal entities; and within each of those, power is diffused yet again among executive, judicial, and legislative branches. (I hope to dive into the why of this system in future posts.) It is not built for hyper-efficiency, precisely because it is designed to ensure that no one person or cabal is able to wield so much power as to become a repressive force in American life. With respect to the certification of a presidential election, the process outlined in the 18th Century and changed but little over the years is almost charming in its ritual. Still today, Electoral College results are delivered to Congress in large, mahogany boxes. They are opened, and their contents are recited for all to hear. Nothing about that moment signals efficiency. It is a fitting end to selecting the executive a federal government designed to curtail the abuse of power.
We do well to see that as a virtue and a strength. Federalism and its limits can be frustratingly time-consuming, both in our elections and in our day-to-day governance. But it is also a powerful check on American democracy going the way of other republics that came before it, and many that have come after it. And when it comes to being on the losing end of an election and of the peaceful transfer of power, that diffusion of power means that not all is lost–that the ballot box is only the beginning of the work of democracy.
What is the peaceful transfer of power supposed to look like? It is supposed to be a gracious end to a sometimes hotly contested election, where the the candidates and supporters of both the victor and the vanquished begin the work of affirming the validity of the process, and where they reframe the interests and passions that the campaign stoked into a renewed commitment to the give and take of active, participatory government. It is supposed to confirm that the people have chosen a steward of their trust.
President-elect William J. Clinton and President George H. W. Bush, November 18, 1992.
Photo Courtesy of the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum.
Look for those who affirm those norms rather than tear them down. Look for those willing to lose gracefully. Look for those who are conciliatory in victory. And be that for others. That is what it is supposed to look like.
(Top Image Credit: Outgoing President Lyndon Johnson (D), left, greeting newly-inaugurated President Richard Nixon (R), right. Photo by Oliver F. Atkins. Source: The United States National Archives.)