The wave of self-congratulation that followed the certification of the 2024 presidential election on Monday was premature in the extreme.
“Today, America’s democracy stood,” Vice President Kamala Harris declared, after she presided over the session that certified her defeat by Donald Trump in November. The previous vice president, Mike Pence, said, similarly, that he welcomed “the return of order and civility to these historic proceedings.” Trump, of course, said it was, “A BIG MOMENT IN HISTORY.”
But we don’t actually know if we have restored the American tradition of a peaceful transfer of power. The catalyst for Jan. 6, 2021, was that Trump lost the presidential election. If he had won, there would have been no rally, no mob, no riot, no attempt to overturn the foundations of constitutional government in the United States.
Imagine if Trump had lost the 2024 presidential election. Having laid the groundwork for it throughout the presidential race, he would have immediately accused Democrats of fraud. We all know that his allies in the Republican Party (which is to say, the Republican Party) would have immediately moved to try to question, undermine and even invalidate the results. And we all know that a raging, vengeful Trump would have tried, again, to overturn the results after the fact.
The peaceful transfer of power is an agreement between rival political factions that the voters have the final say about who they want to lead them and that each side is entitled to govern for as long as it has a legitimate grant of power.
We have no evidence that Trump would have honored this agreement had he lost.
It is not enough for Democrats, alone, to follow the rules. The peaceful transfer of power works only when both sides abide the results of an election. The only way to know if the tradition truly endures, then, is to wait for the next presidential contest. If Democrats win that race, then we’ll have a chance to see if Trump and the Republican Party are committed to this bedrock of democratic government.
Until then, all we can say about the integrity of the peaceful transfer of power in the United States is that it’s an open question.
Now Reading
Simon Kuper on the shadow cast by apartheid South Africa on American politics, for The Financial Times:
Elon Musk lived in apartheid South Africa until he was 17. David Sacks, the venture capitalist who has become a fund-raiser for Donald Trump and a troll of Ukraine, left aged 5, and grew up in a South African diaspora family in Tennessee. Peter Thiel spent years of childhood in South Africa and Namibia, where his father was involved in uranium mining as part of the apartheid regime’s clandestine drive to acquire nuclear weapons. And Paul Furber, an obscure South African software developer and tech journalist living near Johannesburg, has been identified by two teams of forensic linguists as the originator of the QAnon conspiracy, which helped shape Trump’s MAGA movement. Furber denies being “Q.”
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò on “economic anxiety” for Hammer & Hope:
The problem, in contrast, was the implicit aspect of the narrative: the idea that explaining voters’ behavior via economic anxiety rendered other explanations unnecessary, particularly those that highlight the role of racism, misogyny and xenophobia and the machinations of political actors who stoke and exploit these attitudes. This has never made much sense.
Ursula Lindsey on post-Assad Syria for The New York Review of Books:
No one is more stunned than Syrians themselves at the fall of the Assad regime. It lasted half a century, brutalized its own population beyond imagination and toppled like a rotted-out tree in a sudden storm.
Emily Witt on the Los Angeles wildfires for The New Yorker:
As I turned east from Lincoln Avenue, I could see that the destruction was immediate and ongoing. The noxious air smelled of burnt plastic. A few residents stood outside their destroyed homes, trying to put out the last flames with garden hoses.
Amanda Frost on birthright citizenship for The Atlantic:
If birthright citizenship were to end tomorrow for children without at least one parent who was a citizen or lawful permanent resident, it would bar from citizenship hundreds of thousands of people each year. These people wouldn’t be eligible to participate in our democracy, and they would be forced to live and work in the shadows, as would their children and their children’s children. The end of birthright citizenship would create a caste of millions of un-Americans, locked in perpetuity into an inferior, exploitable status.
Photo of the Week
Another photo from my stay in Greece last summer. We are walking up to the Acropolis.
Now Eating: Hearty Split Pea Soup With Bacon
It’s appropriate that I am eating a bowl of soup while I write this. I have no major modifications to make here. You can omit the bacon and chicken stock if you are vegetarian or vegan. I think you would still want the smokiness, so you might want to consider smoked paprika or smoked salt or even a few cubes of pan-fried smoked tofu. You’ll also want to use plenty of olive oil (or whichever fat you prefer) if you’re making this without the bacon. Either way, serve with warm bread (or biscuits!).
Recipe from the cooking section of The New York Times.
Ingredients
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1 pound slab bacon in ¼-inch-thick slices
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1 large onion, chopped
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1 carrot, chopped
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1 stalk celery, chopped
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1 head garlic, cloves peeled and sliced thin
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salt and black pepper
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1 pound dried green split peas, rinsed and picked over
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4 bay leaves
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2 to 3 quarts chicken stock
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½ bunch fresh thyme leaves, stripped from stems
Directions
Dice bacon into ¼-inch cubes. Place in a heavy 6-quart pot over medium-low heat. Cook until fat is rendered and translucent. Add onion, carrot, celery and garlic. Cook until onion and garlic are soft and translucent. Season with salt and pepper.
Add split peas, stir to coat with fat, and add bay leaves and 2 quarts stock. Increase heat and bring to a boil. Reduce heat so soup simmers. Skim foam that rises to the surface for about 10 minutes, until no more appears. Add thyme leaves. Simmer uncovered about 1 hour or longer, until peas are soft and starting to fall apart. Add more stock, as needed.
Remove soup from heat. Add salt and pepper to taste. Purée soup in a food processor in several batches, short of perfect smoothness; you should be able to spoon up some texture. Reheat soup, skimming off any foam. Stir from the bottom to mix well, then ladle into bowls and serve.
