It is one thing to disagree about policy issues, but quite another to disagree about the procedures considered foundational to the legitimacy of a political system.\u00a0 Arguing about elections is not the same as arguing about taxes or foreign policy; disputes about election procedures are systemic in the sense that they involve possible fundamental changes in an established political system.\u00a0 To put this differently, they raise issues of the legitimacy of an elected regime that are not raised in most \u201cwithin system\u201d policy disputes. \u00a0To understand the explosive potential of this sort of conflict more fully, it helps to recognize that elections are not only political procedures.\u00a0 In a real, not just metaphorical, sense, they are also religious rituals.<\/p>\n
Elections and Sacrilege<\/strong><\/p>\n I am certainly not the first commentator to notice that elections in democratic states (and often in non-democracies) bear a strong resemblance to religious rituals.[ii]<\/a>\u00a0 They are meaningful collective events that take place at special times in an atmosphere both solemn and celebratory. \u00a0Like sacred rites, their validity depends upon strict adherence to formal behaviors, such as casting officially sanctioned ballots in officially sanctioned ways at officially sanctioned places. \u00a0Participation is technically optional but is considered a communal duty. \u00a0And elections have effects that may be considered \u201cmagical\u201d or transcendent in some ways: for example, they are assumed to represent the will of the entire<\/em> electorate, including those who failed to vote or who voted against the chosen candidate.\u00a0 Most important, they are believed to confer legitimacy \u2013 a generally recognized right to govern \u2013 upon the Chosen One.<\/p>\n I want to push this analogy even further \u2013 in fact, push it to the point that it becomes more than an analogy \u2013 by suggesting that American elections are<\/em> religious rituals of a certain sort. They are rites of what sociologists call \u201ccivil religion\u201d: a fusion of traditional religious beliefs and practices with secular ideologies such as nationalism.[iii]<\/a>\u00a0 In republics like the U.S.A., elections are the climax of the political process and chief sacraments of the democratic faith. Not only do they confer prospective legitimacy on would-be rulers, they also reaffirm the social contract that created the community to begin with. When we vote, we reenact the consensual procedures that made us a nation. This reenactment, furthermore, is no mere pageant or historical memorial. \u00a0For believers in the nation, it actually reconstitutes<\/em> the body politic, extending its existence from a hallowed past into an open-ended future.<\/p>\n According to the historian of religion, Mercea Eliade, this is precisely what rituals like the Jewish Passover meal and the Christian Eucharist are meant to do. \u00a0They reenact the origins of a community and, in the process, recreate it.\u00a0 According to him, these celebratory rites take place in a \u201csacred time\u201d that is simultaneously past and present.\u00a0 Participating in them confirms one\u2019s membership in the community and<\/em> perpetuates the community as a spiritual entity.[iv]<\/a>\u00a0 The parallel with elections seems clear.\u00a0 But since Eliade\u2019s primary interest is in how such rituals generate consensus, he doesn\u2019t say much about the sort of situation we face right now \u2013 a state of affairs in which the procedures meant to generate and celebrate unity become a source of intense division and conflict.<\/p>\n Consider the ongoing dispute between supporters and opponents of Donald Trump over the validity of the 2020 presidential election.\u00a0 Almost as soon as he became President, Trump began predicting that the next election would be \u201crigged\u201d against him \u2013 an echo of his charge that Hillary Clinton\u2019s plurality of popular votes in 2016 was the result of illegal immigrants voting.\u00a0 In response, Democrats accused Trump of undermining the democratic process by casting aspersions on the election \u2013 essentially, a charge of sacrilege (denigrating a sacred institution) as well as a sign of authoritarian contempt for democratic processes.<\/p>\n The charge was not pure hyperbole; Trump\u2019s opponents had reason to fear that he was insufficiently devoted to democratic norms, and that his more zealous supporters might reject the election results violently, as some later attempted to do at the U.S. Capitol.\u00a0 Interestingly, the Trump camp\u2019s response to this accusation was tu quoque<\/em>: we are only paying you back for your own violations of the sanctity of the process.\u00a0 According to them, the original sacrilege occurred when Democratic leaders questioned the validity of the 2016 presidential vote on the ground that the Russians had interfered with the election, and that Trump had become, in essence, an agent of Vladimir Putin.\u00a0 This assertion, with its corollary of Trumpian illegitimacy, became the basis for a two-year investigation by the Justice Department, culminating in a report filed by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller in 2019.<\/p>\n Democrats still have difficulty understanding the gravity of this charge of Russian manipulation of the electoral process.\u00a0 While the Mueller Report concluded that the Russian regime had conspired to leak hacked Democratic Party emails and to use social media to foment discord among voters, \u201cthe investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.\u201d[v]<\/a>\u00a0 Nor did it establish that any acts of the Russians had a significant effect on the election results, although it could be argued that in a contest this close, virtually any irregularity might have made a difference. \u00a0In any case, the Report allowed the President and his supporters to argue that the anti-Trumps had fought a long, expensive, ultimately fruitless battle to deny Trump\u2019s legitimacy as an elected leader and were not the righteous defenders of the electoral sacrament that they claimed to be.<\/p>\n Here we see illustrated one of the painful ironies of religious history: the tendency of rituals designed to unite the community to become sources of acute division when the community is already in conflict. During more than a century of bloody religious warfare in Europe (roughly 1550-1690), Catholics and Protestants fought bitterly, and Protestant sects fought among themselves, over the proper conduct and interpretation of the Eucharist, infant baptism, and other communal rites, as well as sacred objects like the crucifix, church statuary, and stained-glass windows. \u00a0Witnessing some of the current disputes in America\u2019s politicized \u201cculture wars,\u201d one feels a weird sort of historical d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu. \u00a0Use the wrong word, make the wrong gesture, venerate the wrong relic, and you will be branded some sort of heretic. \u00a0The point, I think, is that under such circumstances it is fruitless to rely on sacred rituals to resolve intra-communal conflicts. These conflicts must first be understood. Then, steps can be taken to eliminate or mitigate their causes.\u00a0 Then, and only then, can rituals designed to reintegrate divided communities perhaps be revivified.<\/p>\n Accusations of Electoral Fraud: A New Big Lie?<\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s time that someone wrote an institutional history of American elections \u2013 not the usual narrative of winners and losers that resembles a history of heavyweight boxing, but the story of how a vital collective ritual has evolved over time.\u00a0 I suspect that such a tale might reveal some of the same contradictions manifested by the history of sacred rites.\u00a0 Rising conflict in the community makes reenacting the ritual \u2013 and \u201cgetting it right\u201d \u2013 even more important than in times of social peace. \u00a0On the other, if intense differences have sufficiently undermined people\u2019s sense of being part of a nationwide moral community, the ritual\u2019s failure to resolve the conflict can lead in the direction of violence, even civil war.<\/p>\n The conflict-resolving potential of democratic elections is best illustrated by the elections that some analysts call \u201ccritical\u201d — those that realign political forces and sometimes create new political party systems. [vi]<\/a> \u00a0Mass participation in political campaigns and voting tends to peak during periods of escalated social conflict, when electoral campaigns present voters with significant choices between competing philosophies, political styles, and policies. \u00a0The 2020 presidential election drew the highest percentage of eligible voters to the polls since 1900, a year that involved another electoral battle often thought of as critical.[vii]<\/a>\u00a0 The stakes in such contests are unusually high, with violent storm clouds gathering, but the election itself is felt to be a way of defusing the threat and settling the conflict peacefully, at least for the time being.\u00a0 During the momentous elections of 1876 (conflict over Southern Reconstruction), 1893 (conflict over Populism and \u201cfree silver\u201d), and 1932 (conflict over the Great Depression and labor rights), it probably helped that one side won decisively and that the election results were not disputed.<\/p>\n If the electoral ritual works, this is a sign that, despite sharp divisions, the diverse groups making up the electorate still consider themselves a moral community \u2013 a \u201cbody politic\u201d whose members are responsible for each other, even if they disagree. \u00a0If it doesn\u2019t, as in the nightmarish election of 1860, which brought Abraham Lincoln to power with less than 40% of the popular vote, it dramatizes communal dissolution and can trigger the worst sort of divorce: a move toward civil violence.\u00a0 In the United States, turnouts at the polls were generally much higher in the second half of the nineteenth century than in the twentieth, perhaps because the social issues in dispute were so momentous. The danger, however, was that the possible outcomes of social conflict would be considered too <\/em>momentous to be decided by \u201cmechanical\u201d electoral processes.\u00a0 If the conflict were long-lasting and intense enough, the ritual itself might then be seen as poisoned by the malice or bad will of one\u2019s opponents: a process designed to suppress one of the hostile parties rather than to provide a basis for communal reunification.<\/p>\n I think that one must keep this background in mind to understand the current dispute over the presidential election of 2020, in which one side claims that there was large-scale fraud in the voting while the other asserts that its candidate won fairly, squarely, and decisively.\u00a0 To the anti-Trump forces, charges of fraud unsupported by evidence and rejected by the courts testify to the right wing\u2019s contempt for the electoral process, bad faith, and uncontrolled lust for power. To the pro-Trumps, however, the same lack of evidence implicates the failure of local authorities to investigate the balloting (in particular, the unprecedently large mail-in vote) thoroughly, to inspect voting machines, and to take seriously charges of an Establishment plot to oust the Trump regime.\u00a0 Each side\u2019s distrust of the other is heightened by the narrowness of the electoral victory; as in 2016, a relative handful of votes in 2020 made the difference between winning and losing states with a crucial number of electoral college votes.\u00a0 Despite his popular vote advantage of approximately 7 million votes, Joe Biden\u2019s margin of victory was less than one percent in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin, and less than three percent in Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Michigan.<\/p>\n In a series of powerfully written articles, Yale historian Timothy Snyder asserts that the Trumpian claim of massive vote fraud in 2020 is the equivalent of the \u201cBig Lie\u201d promulgated by totalitarian leaders like Hitler on their way to absolute power. Snyder points out that Trump never wavered in asserting that electoral fraud was the key to Democratic victories at the polls, and that, as a congenital liar, if not a mythomaniac, he never felt obliged to produce evidence to support the accusation.\u00a0 Snyder calls this behavior \u201cpre-fascist\u201d and relates it to a disregard for truth. \u00a0\u201cPost-truth is\u00a0<\/strong>pre-fascism,\u201d he says, \u201cand Trump has been our post-truth president.\u201d<\/p>\n When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions.[viii]<\/a><\/p>\n So far as it goes, this reasoning seems unanswerable, but it leaves crucial issues unexplored.\u00a0 What produces such a serious dissensus about \u201cbasic facts\u201d?\u00a0 Why do so many people disbelieve the \u201cinstitutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us\u201d?\u00a0 Why, in this case, does belief in a rigged election constitute such an \u201cattractive abstraction and fiction\u201d?\u00a0 Snyder refers repeatedly to Trump\u2019s non-stop lies and the gullibility of citizens who dream of \u201cbreaking the system.\u201d\u00a0 But this leaves us with a clich\u00e9 image of the credulous masses manipulated by a clever demagogue, and poses another question: what are the social conditions that provoke such radical dreams?<\/p>\n Other analysts have compared the refusal of many voters to accept the legitimacy of the election results to the behavior of a sect under the influence of a cult leader.\u00a0 The \u201cTrump cult\u201d is another way to suggest that people who believe his lies lack agency.\u00a0 But I think that this scorn for Trump\u2019s supporters is actually a way to avoid talking about the causes of their alienation. \u00a0The cult image, like most clich\u00e9s, contains a modicum of truth.\u00a0 But the effect of its focus on the personal<\/em> (the Leader\u2019s bad character and the intellectual laziness of his Followers) is to exempt systemic<\/em> features of the situation from examination. If we want to understand the factors inclining tens of millions of Americans to believe that significant election fraud occurred whether or not evidence of it was produced in court, we need to ask what basic needs this belief was intended to satisfy.<\/p>\n Trust, Distrust, and Unsatisfied Needs: What to Do Next<\/strong><\/p>\n Believers in election fraud evince radical distrust of forces they consider hostile: distrust of state and federal government officials, of the opposing political party, of economic interests that stand to benefit from their loss, of technical and scientific experts who claim to be objective, and of social groups that they consider corruptible. \u00a0Some of their opponents brand this distrust a symptom of mental unbalance or prejudice, or of commitment to unprovable \u201cconspiracy theories.\u201d\u00a0 But even if the charge of electoral fraud be unwarranted, as I believe it is, the distrust that motivates it is based not simply on fantasy but on experience.<\/p>\n Shall we trust the government? Political officials are<\/em> notorious liars. Leftists as well as conservatives will remember the \u201cTonkin Gulf incident\u201d in Vietnam that never occurred, the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that never materialized, and the promises of honest government and equal opportunity that were never kept.\u00a0 Clearly, members of the opposing political party are as partisan, as obsessed by winning, and as inclined to tailor the truth to suit their interests as are their adversaries. \u00a0What then of major companies, like the corporate giants who rejected Trump\u2019s claims of election fraud? [ix]<\/a>\u00a0 Are they to be trusted?\u00a0 Please! \u00a0Big business executives lie for a living and call it advertising \u2013 or testimony. \u00a0As for the educated elites, scientific and technical experts generally try not to lie, but they are remarkably unaware of the extent to which their findings are colored by partisan assumptions, fears, and hopes.<\/p>\n The causes of distrust, it seems to me, are related to the fact that a great many Trump partisans represent sectors of society that have been traduced and misled by America\u2019s ruling elites, in particular, the business elite that controls the largest share of wealth and income in America\u2019s history.[x]<\/a> \u00a0A key factor that inclines them to blame people below them in social status for their troubles rather than indict their social \u201csuperiors\u201d is the prevalence and strength of taboos in American society (and many other societies).\u00a0 Large numbers of people, especially in deindustrializing or rural regions, are seriously at risk economically, but are barred by political and cultural taboos from naming or criticizing the capitalist system. The same sufferers face deteriorating community services but are strongly discouraged from criticizing local elites or questioning how schools, police, or medical institutions (all operating in the red) function.\u00a0 Their social status relative to other groups is slipping, but other taboos (some associated with \u201cpolitical correctness\u201d) prevent them from expressing themselves freely about this insecurity.\u00a0 And while their personal and family lives may be increasingly chaotic, custom prevents them from blaming traditional family structures, venal churches, or predatory companies for their misfortunes.<\/p>\n In all these cases, with some help from demagogic leaders, frustrated and angry people soon find substitute targets for their animosity.\u00a0 The \u201cproblem\u201d \u2013 the enemy \u2013 becomes globalizing business interests, Chinese traders, immigrant workers, \u201cso-called scientific<\/p>\n experts,\u201d and Black Lives Matter organizers . . .\u00a0 or (to return to our electoral theme) the hordes of unscrupulous dark-skinned people, bribed and exploited by Democrats, who are prepared to use any methods, including electoral fraud, to win elections.<\/p>\n The point I want to insist on here is that right-wing conservatism, with all its delusions and reaction-formations, is the result of unsatisfied basic needs for security, identity, dignity, and autonomy, and that the steadily intensifying conflict over election procedures cannot be resolved sustainably without finding ways to satisfy those legitimate needs.\u00a0 Of course, Republican politicians are afraid that increasing election turnouts will jeopardize their hold on political offices and the spoils of power.\u00a0 But these narrow, often venal interests do not negate the human needs of the right-wing\u2019s exploited, humiliated, anxiety-ridden constitutents. Moreover, to the extent that disputes over electoral procedures are civil-religious in nature, this reminds us how difficult it is to resolve such conflicts merely by insisting on principle, whether the principle be majority rule or the priesthood of all believers.\u00a0 Democrats need to keep in mind that winning the electoral wars will be a pyrrhic victory if their adversaries\u2019 human needs are not recognized and dealt with fairly.<\/p>\n Those conducting that battle on the Democratic side need to recognize that these needs have to be recognized even in the heat of a majority rule vs. minority rights debate.<\/p>\n NOTES:<\/strong><\/p>\n [i]<\/a> The classic statement of the anti-majoritarian viewpoint in pre-Civil War years was John C. Calhoun\u2019s advocacy of the \u201cconcurrent majority\u201d in his Disquisition on Government <\/em>(1851) (St. Augustine\u2019s Press, 2007).<\/p>\n [ii]<\/a> See, for example, Ritual and Rhythm in Electoral Systems: A Comparative Legal Account <\/em>by Graeme Orr, an Australian law professor (Routledge, 2015).<\/p>\n [iii]<\/a> The classical statement of civil religion doctrine is Robert N. Bellah, \u201cCivil Religion in America,\u201d D\u00e6dalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Winter 1967, Vol. 96, No. 1<\/em>) pp. 1-21. <\/em>\u00a0A good update is Martin Angrosino, \u201cCivil Religion Redux,\u201d Anthropological Quarterly <\/em>(Spring 2002, Vol 75 No. 2), pp. 239-267.<\/p>\n [iv]<\/a> See Mercia Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion <\/em>(U. of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 68 et seq.<\/p>\n [v]<\/a> Robert S. Mueller, <\/em>Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election<\/em>. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, March 2019, pp. 1-2<\/p>\n [vi]<\/a> See Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections: And the Mainsprings of American Politics <\/em>(New York: W.W. Norton, 1971).<\/p>\n [vii]<\/a> See Kevin Schaul et al., \u201c2020 turnout is the highest in more than a century,\u201d Washington Post\u00a0 <\/em>https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/graphics\/2020\/elections\/voter-turnout<\/em><\/a>. <\/em>November 5, 2020, updated December 18, 2020.<\/p>\n [viii]<\/a> Timothy Snyder, \u201cThe American Abyss,\u201d New York Times Magazine<\/em>, January 8, 2021<\/p>\n [ix]<\/a> Dan Mangan, \u201cMajor business leaders tell Congress: Certify Biden won Electoral College, Trump lost.\u201d WNBC, January 4, 2021. https:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/2021\/01\/04\/business-leaders-tell-congress-to-certify-biden-won-election-trump-lost.html<\/p>\n [x]<\/a> See, e.g., Katherine Schaeffer, \u201c6 facts about inequality in the United States.\u201d Pew Research Center, Feb. 6, 2020.<\/p>\n https:\/\/www.pewresearch.org\/fact-tank\/2020\/02\/07\/6-facts-about-economic-inequality-in-the-u-s\/#:~:text=The%20share%20of%20American%20adults,from%2025%25%20to%2029%25<\/a>.<\/p>\n __________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n I am certainly not the first commentator to notice that elections in democratic states (and often in non-democracies) bear a strong resemblance to religious rituals. They are meaningful collective events that take place at special times in an atmosphere both solemn and celebratory. \u00a0Like sacred rites, their validity depends upon strict adherence to formal behaviors, such as casting officially sanctioned ballots in officially sanctioned ways at officially sanctioned places. \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":98542,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[276,1757,109,107],"class_list":["post-181821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editorial","tag-democracy","tag-nation-state","tag-politics","tag-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181821"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181821\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Richard-E.-Rubenstein.jpg\")
<\/a><\/em>Richard E. Rubenstein is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a> and a professor of conflict resolution and public affairs at George Mason University\u2019s Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution. A graduate of Harvard College, Oxford University (Rhodes Scholar), and Harvard Law School, Rubenstein is the author of nine books on analyzing and resolving violent social conflicts. His most recent book is <\/em>Resolving Structural Conflicts: How Violent Systems Can Be Transformed (Routledge, 2017).\u00a0 His book in progress, to be published in fall 2020, is <\/em>Post-Corona Conflicts: New Sources of Struggle and Opportunities for Peace.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"