On March 4, 1801 at the first light of dawn, a bitter little man left the White House to return to his native Massachusetts. John Adams, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States and the second president in the history of the country (1797-1801), was then a humiliated man, who had lost his re-election campaign a few months earlier at the hands of Thomas Jefferson, whose the inauguration is scheduled for the same day. Not feeling the strength to attend the consecration of his rival, Adams left the capital a few hours before the official end of his only mandate.
We might be tempted to see this as an expression of a sore loser’s resentment, but that would be to lose sight of the importance of what is at stake. All specialists in democratization know it: the first transfer of power from one party to another is a crucial test for a nascent democracy. By recognizing the verdict of the ballot box and by voluntarily ceding power, Adams has just secured the United States its first peaceful handover of presidential power, thus establishing a precedent which will be one of the most solid foundations of American democracy.
In this republic founded on the rejection of tyranny and personal power, no president defeated by the ballot box will seek to cling to power.
Despite the bitterness of the defeat, neither Herbert Hoover (1933), nor Gerald Ford (1977), nor Jimmy Carter (1981), nor George H. Bush (1993), to take some of the most recent examples, have thought about contesting their defeat. Even Al Gore, the vice president of Bill Clinton whose defeat in 2000 was decided by a handful of votes in Florida and confirmed by a controversial Supreme Court ruling, has disarmed and sent his disappointed supporters home.
Adams, Hoover, Ford, Carter, Bush: none of these losers claimed the election was rigged; none called on armed groups to “stand by”; none announced their victory prematurely before the results were released to create confusion; none contacted election officials to ask them to “find” the missing votes to win a state; none asked its vice-president, charged with counting the votes of the Electoral College by Congress, to overturn the result of the election. Above all, it must be remembered, none of these deposed presidents agitated their supporters for weeks, if not months and years, pushing them deliberately or not (the report of the special House committee should clarify this point) to attack the Capitol to interrupt the vote count, an exercise at the heart of the centuries-old ritual of peaceful transition of power.
As this week marks the first anniversary of the rioters attack on the Capitol, one wonders if the date of January 6, 2021 will not go down in history as marking the end of a cycle, one that began 220 years earlier when another president with wounded pride chose to comply with the rules of the game that prevail in a republican regime.
There is no shortage of reasons for concern when we observe the reluctance of the majority of elected Republican officials to condemn the events of last January to rather support more or less openly the unfounded and improbable allegations of a massive fraud that would have allowed the victory of Joe Biden in November 2020.
In the face of the increasingly uninhibited cynicism of the leaders of the Grand Old Party stands the helplessness of a Democratic Party weakened by its divisions, clinging to its tiny majorities in Congress and incapable of asserting itself where it is and will continue to play the future of American democracy and so many other issues, whether in state legislatures and on the Supreme Court.
Despite this worrying climate, announcing the end of the democratic regime in the event of a Republican victory (legitimate or not) in 2024, as many have liked to do for months, is premature. American democracy, although imperfect, benefits from many advantages which favor its maintenance: a durable Constitution centered on the separation of powers and the protection of individual rights, today practically unamendable (consequence of political polarization); a rigid federal structure that guarantees states their rights in the face of illegitimate interventions by the national government; a political system relatively open to citizen participation; and a civic body broken with democratic practices. However, it is said that the worst is never certain, although it is always possible. Only time will tell if John Adams was right or wrong when he said, “Democracy never lasts long.” She corrupts herself, she becomes exhausted and ends up murdering herself. There has never been a democracy that has not committed suicide. ”
Closer than you think
The assault on the Capitol took place in an international context marked by a global decline in democracy, as shown in the latest annual report of the NGO Freedom House entitled Democracy Under Siege. Canada is avoiding this trend for now, but is keeping its eyes on its American neighbor. Some politicians have already tried, with mixed success, to import the populist and abrasive style of former President Trump.
For further
American Elections: Wicked Game (Wondery / Lindsay Graham): Each episode of this podcast chronicles one of the presidential elections that took place from 1789 to 2020.
The book by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, Peril (Simon & Schuster, 2021), recounts in detail the final months of the Trump presidency during the transition period.
To understand the ambivalent relationship of the Founding Fathers of the United States to democracy, read Democracy: a political history of a word (Lux, 2013) by Francis Dupuis-Déri.
Freedom House, Democracy Under Siege, 2021. Latest annual report of the NGO Freedom House on the state of democracy in the world.