{"id":318934,"date":"2026-08-03T12:01:56","date_gmt":"2026-08-03T11:01:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=318934"},"modified":"2026-08-01T18:01:31","modified_gmt":"2026-08-01T17:01:31","slug":"trump-elections-and-democracy-how-we-can-move-beyond-electoral-fetishism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2026\/08\/trump-elections-and-democracy-how-we-can-move-beyond-electoral-fetishism\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump, Elections, and Democracy: How We Can Move Beyond Electoral Fetishism"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>Donald Trump\u2019s much ballyhooed public address on 16 Jul 2026 \u2013 an attempt to pressure Congress to approve his \u201cSave America\u201d election legislation \u2013 turned out to be a pitiful bust.\u00a0 Even Sean Hannity seemed embarrassed by a speech that claimed large\u2011scale \u201celection vulnerabilities,\u201d including hundreds of thousands of alleged non\u2011citizen votes and Chinese hacking of voter files but offered zero evidence of fraud in the 2020 presidential election.<\/p>\n

Evidence or no evidence, Trump can\u2019t stop alleging that the vote for Biden was rigged \u2013 a compulsive accusation that anti-Trumpers attribute to his inability to accept defeat, his delusional tendencies, and his intention to challenge the results of the upcoming federal midterm elections.\u00a0 The president\u2019s bad motives and psychological mishigas<\/em> are undeniable.\u00a0 Even so, his election denialism has significant causes that most Democrats avoid mentioning, since to do so could expose their own role in provoking the madness of King Donald.<\/p>\n

Where the election of 2020 is concerned, the president is quite crazed \u2013 but what drove him around the bend?\u00a0 Most critics seem determined to forget that the original trauma in this case \u2013 the first serious allegations of a rigged election casting doubt on the authenticity of the voting process \u2013 were the charges made by Democratic leaders and pursued by various \u201cdeep state\u201d agencies under Joe Biden that Trump and his campaign had conspired with the Russians to defeat Hilary Clinton in 2016.<\/p>\n

How could a vulgar upstart and political amateur like Trump defeat a seasoned professional like Hilary?\u00a0 It must have been a Russian plot!\u00a0 Few Democrats these days have much to say about \u201cRussiagate.\u201d \u00a0They seem to have difficulty remembering that during the 2016 campaign the DNC hired a former British spy to compile evidence of a Trump-Russia conspiracy (the \u201cSteele Dossier\u201d) while encouraging F.B.I. director James Comey to begin a major investigation of his own.\u00a0 The Steele dossier turned out to be weakly sourced and unreliable.\u00a0 After the election Democratic-controlled congressional committees held extensive hearings on the matter, also without significant results.\u00a0 And after two years more of further investigation, Special Counsel Robert Mueller issued a report stating that Russian agencies had indeed attempted to interfere with the election, but that evidence of a conspiracy implicating the Trump campaign was lacking.<\/p>\n

All that work to \u201cexplain\u201d Trump\u2019s election \u2013 and with such disappointing results!\u00a0 Not only was the conspiracy unproved, but there was no evidence at all that Russian interference had had a measurable impact on the 2016 election. \u00a0In that year six key industrial states that had voted for Obama four years earlier went for Trump by substantial majorities \u2013 not because of Russian trolls or hacked Clinton emails, but because so many working people felt that the Democrats had abandoned them.\u00a0 Even so, the losers could not resist charging, in effect, that the election had been \u201crigged\u201d by Trump and the Russians.<\/p>\n

It seems clear, in retrospect, that the Russiagate allegations were hardly more substantial than Trump\u2019s subsequent insistence that the election of 2020 had been stolen.\u00a0 But today\u2019s Democratic leaders take no responsibility for attempting to delegitimize a winning presidential candidate by casting doubt on the validity of the electoral process.\u00a0 Nor, even if \u201cprogressives,\u201d will they admit that any of the criminal charges brought against Trump in the Biden era were hostile exercises of prosecutorial discretion.\u00a0 Anti-Trumpers tend to attribute their nemesis\u2019s obsessiveness and vengefulness exclusively to his own defects of character.\u00a0 These defects, God knows, are plentiful.\u00a0 But it’s U.S. political institutions, not just Donald J. Trump\u2019s personality, that are deformed.\u00a0 And most of his adversaries don\u2019t seem to want to deal with that<\/em> reality at all.<\/p>\n

When Trump says that elections are rigged and proposes \u201creforms\u201d that would suppress voter participation, one\u2019s impulse is to spring to the defense of the current electoral system.\u00a0 There is certainly reason to suspect that the president is an authoritarian operator who would happily rig an election himself rather than surrender power. His fake reforms should be strongly opposed, of course.\u00a0 But electoral fetishism is not an effective response to his election denialism.\u00a0 The system as it stands is <\/em>rigged in favor of candidates and policies favored by the capitalist elite: the oligarchs and their political servitors.\u00a0 It does<\/em> need to be changed, although surely not in the ways Trump is proposing. \u00a0Three sources of electoral corruption deserve particular notice: U.S. <\/u>constitutional and legal norms, an evenly divided electorate, and Big Money.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The U.S. Constitution is a document that was intended to consolidate the gains of the American Revolution while preventing power from falling into the hands of the \u201cmob.\u201d As a result, even after enfranchising women, former slaves, and poor people, we have inherited a presidential electoral system that makes it possible to win an election by millions of popular votes but still lose the presidency. \u00a0Our senatorial voting system gives equal representation to Wyoming\u2019s half million residents and 34.5 million Californians, while the rules of apportionment approved by the U.S. Supreme Court permit the outrageously partisan (and racist) gerrymandering of legislative electoral districts by those in power. \u00a0Meanwhile, a \u201cwinner-take-all\u201d norm in almost all U.S. elections assures that groups constituting a voting minority will be subject for years to the dictates of those constituting a majority \u2013 even if the election was decided by a few hundred or a few thousand votes bought or coerced by powerful interests.<\/li>\n
  2. In fact, when the electorate is evenly divided, a little fraud can go a long way. Donald Trump\u2019s partisans are unable to prove that illegal voting played a significant role in any recent election \u2013 but the idea that a relative handful of illicit votes can swing a closely fought contest is far from a paranoid fantasy.\u00a0 As Tracy Campbell shows in her richly documented study, Deliver the Vote <\/em>(2005), serious electoral fraud has been \u201can American tradition\u201d since colonial times.\u00a0 One recalls the presidential election of 1960, when John Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon in Illinois by 8,858 votes out of almost 5 million cast.\u00a0 That result was confirmed only after Chicago\u2019s mayor Richard J. Daley, who had delayed reporting the city\u2019s vote until the downstate (mainly Republican) vote had been calculated, announced it.\u00a0 Some Republicans charged fraud both in Illinois and in Texas, where the Democratic machine was also very powerful, but post-election investigations were half-hearted, no \u201csmoking gun\u201d proving significant wrongdoing was discovered, and Nixon \u2013 unlike Trump \u2013 was not inclined to pursue the matter after his rival was inaugurated.<\/li>\n
  3. More important than this potential for electoral fraud, however, is the permeation of American elections by Big Money: a form of legalized corruption that gives the oligarchic elite and its political representatives decisive influence over the ideas and behavior of U.S. political parties, candidates for office, and voters. Private campaign contributions have always been an outsized influence on U.S. elections, but In Citizens United<\/em> and subsequent legal cases, the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed the rights of wealthy individuals and corporations to engage in a range of practices that includes creating super-PACS and funneling \u201cdark money\u201d into political campaigns. The floodgates opened, and in 2024 Elon Musk alone contributed around $290 million in various forms to the campaigns of Trump and other Republican candidates.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    In the same election the Harris campaign outspent that of Trump by almost half a billion dollars . . . and still lost.\u00a0 The moral: U.S. elections are corrupted not so much by simple vote-buying as by a system that permits an elite to establish the political and ideological ground rules which limit the choices of \u201cacceptable\u201d candidates and policies available to voters.\u00a0 A major purpose of these rules is to keep the oligarchs\u2019 basic \u201crights\u201d to own and control great accumulations of capital from being subjected to challenge by elected officials.<\/p>\n

    The current turmoil in the United States, with President Trump\u2019s popularity declining and many Democrats moving somewhat to the left, provides an interesting test of how the system works.\u00a0 Even though the Democratic Party\u2019s self-declared \u201cdemocratic socialists\u201d are little more than outspoken liberals, Trump and the Heritage Foundation have started to call them communists.\u00a0 So far, this name-calling has not been accompanied by much repression, probably because most oligarchs understand that Bernie Sanders or AOC-style progressivism does not seriously threaten their ownership or management privileges.\u00a0 If these privileges are brought into question, however, a different line is likely to be drawn, and repressive measures initiated.<\/p>\n

    Many Democrats and some Republicans want to increase taxes on the rich, provide a wider range of public welfare services to working people, regulate big corporations more effectively, and shift resources from military to peacetime uses. \u00a0Since the New Deal, the corporate elite has considered such demands negotiable rather than taboo.\u00a0 But if political organizers wish to go further, say, by capping or confiscating great wealth, advocating the public ownership of key resources, greatly reducing military-industrial expenditures, or redefining management rights (including the \u201cright\u201d to buy political candidates), the situation is likely to change.\u00a0 An oligarchy feeling genuinely threatened will define such activists as unAmerican extremists and subject them to McCarthy-style repression, or worse.<\/p>\n

    Is a mass-based anti-capitalist mobilization possible?\u00a0 I think so.\u00a0 Especially if the world capitalist system has entered a period of crisis that some theorists believe can only get worse, moderate reforms of the sort favored by Democratic progressives are likely to prove ineffective, and organizers proposing more radical changes could find themselves leading a mass movement.\u00a0 The fear that a genuine Left could emerge in the U.S. motivates fascistic representatives of the oligarchy like Stephen Miller to propose preemptive repression — including measures intended to \u201cfix\u201d the electoral rules.\u00a0 But the answer to such threats is not just to condemn Miller, and certainly not to sacralize the pre-Trump voting system.<\/p>\n

    For now, elements of the old system such as mail-in ballots must be protected against Trumpian vote-suppressing tactics.\u00a0 But the point of doing this is to lay the groundwork for a transformation that will break the power of the oligarchy and turn elections into a genuine method (among others) of self-rule.\u00a0 Our guiding aim cannot be simply to \u201cdefend\u201d a deeply compromised democracy.\u00a0 It must be to create a real one.<\/p>\n

    __________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/a> Richard E. Rubenstein is a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Media Service<\/em><\/a> Editorial Committee, of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/em><\/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). <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    How could a vulgar upstart and political amateur like Trump defeat a seasoned professional like Hilary?\u00a0 It must have been a Russian plot!\u00a0 Few Democrats these days have much to say about \u201cRussiagate.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":238768,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[867,276,392,3324,249,70],"class_list":["post-318934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-anglo-america","tag-democracy","tag-elections","tag-north-america","tag-trump","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318934","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=318934"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318934\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":318935,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318934\/revisions\/318935"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/238768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=318934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=318934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=318934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}