Without faith in elections, a republic will fall.
William S. LIND
Many people on the right have questioned the accuracy of the vote count in the 2020 election. Surveys have found that as many as half of Republican voters think President Biden’s victory was fraudulent. Apparent anomalies in in 2022 may raise further doubts. An editorial in the November 16 Wall Street Journal noted that the narrow Republican majority in the House does not reflect a 4.4 percent Republican advantage in ballots cast. The Journal correctly says there is no such thing as a “House vote”—there are votes in 435 separate House races. But it may be fuel for the vote-fraud bonfire nonetheless.
Honest elections are important because each party thinks it can win if only the votes are cast and counted accurately. If one party loses consistently in honest elections, it knows it must alter its agenda.
In a monarchy, if a king tries to put his bastard on the throne, he may face a civil war; the legitimacy of the system depends on lines of descent. A republic’s legitimacy depends on widespread public belief in the integrity of elections. If that belief erodes, civil discord is likely.
What is legitimacy? It is willing acceptance of rulings by authorities with whom we disagree. When our doctor tells us not to eat fois gras more than once a week, we do as he says,
painful though it is; we regard his authority as legitimate. When our priest tells us we must give it up through the whole 40 days of Lent, we grumble but obey (it helps that caviar is still okay); we accept his captaining of our souls as legitimate. If we rotund citizens with high cholesterol think the votes were honestly collected and counted, we hold our noses and let President Biden decree vegan lunches for school children. We console ourselves that those future voters will be rock-solid Republicans.
So are America’s elections generally honest? It is impossible to know. As more and more voting and counting are done electronically, confidence in both necessarily wanes. Why? Because the phrase “electronic security” is an oxymoron. There can be no such thing. The more something becomes electronic, the more it is subject to manipulation. If done skillfully, it cannot be detected.
in Leviathan; the best modern work is Martin van Creveld’s The Rise and Decline of the State.) Our republic is not doing a terribly good job of that at present, as urban crime statistics show.
States have since taken on further work, failure in which can bring crises of legitimacy. Most dangerously, in the 20th century they assumed responsibility for economic prosperity.
Around the globe they find themselves stretched ever-thinner by that task, with one foot on a dock labeled “fiscal and monetary policy” and the other on a moving boat named “Inflation.”
A widespread crisis of legitimacy of the state promises to be a major theme in the history of the 21st century. In more and more countries, the state has become a monopoly of a “new class,” an elite that can’t make things work and uses its power and wealth to exempt itself from the consequences of things not working. In Western countries, including our own, that elite has adopted an ideology of cultural Marxism that condemns the beliefs and folkways of its own people as evil.
In response, more and more ordinary citizens are shifting their primary loyalty away from the state to other things: to ethnic groups and races, religions and causes, ideologies, cartels, and sometimes violence for its own sake. This is the basis for Fourth Generation war, war waged by entities other than states.
A crisis of legitimacy of the American state is not something conservatives can welcome, because with it comes spreading disorder. Russell Kirk reminds us that the first conservative principle is order. How can we prevent it?
A first step would be to restore near-universal belief in the probity of elections. It’s not hard: just go back to voting on one day, with paper ballots that are hand-counted under the supervision of poll-watchers from all parties. Absentee voting would again be permitted only by people who can prove they must be somewhere other than their precinct. Yes, sometimes there was vote-fraud with that time-tested system. Nixon actually won in 1960 and he knew it, but he refused to raise the issue of ballot-box stuffing in Cook County, Illinois, because he did not want to endanger the legitimacy of the system. Does that make Biden trickier than Dick?
Other tasks in shoring up the legitimacy of the state are harder. But if there is again a broad consensus on the honesty of elections, we should be able to face these challenges as well. Without faith in the results of elections, nothing else is possible because no action of government will be accepted by a large fraction of the population. At that point a state can rule only by fear.
