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Moral Superiority Won’t Save Us
Now, the work starts anew.
Yesterday, January 6, 2025, a democratically-elected congress certified the most recent general election for Donald Trump. Compared to January 6, 2021, it was a much less raucous affair. There were no angry mobs, no Confederate flags, no overrun barricades, no injured or dead, no feces smeared on the walls. Just a peaceful transition of power in a free and fair election that Trump won fair and square.
He may not have the mandate that he thinks he has — he didn’t even win a majority of votes, just a plurality, meaning more people voted for someone other than him. Still, he won both the electoral college and the popular vote, even if the latter was by the smallest margin in recent history.
Kamala Harris, the 2024 Democratic nominee for President and sitting Vice President, oversaw the affair in keeping with her constitutional duties. There were no objections, no violence erupted, and everything was done inside of an hour.
This, many Democrats trumpeted, was how democracy works. We don’t point fingers and claim a rigged election when there was no mass fraud. We don’t succumb to conspiracies about how the whole thing was fixed and we were unjustly robbed. We don’t send a barrage of frivolous and unsupported lawsuits to try and stop the election certification, and we don’t try to interrupt the goings-on of the process and install our person as the leader even though they ultimately lost.
The thinking goes that we on the left are morally superior to those on the right who fabricated and perpetuated the idea of fraud when there was none and instigated a riot to overthrow American democracy as we know it. Rather, we acknowledge that we lost a fair election, and we will hand over the reins of power in keeping with our democratic processes. All we can do is figure out what went wrong this time and correct it next time.
Assuming, of course, that there is a next time.
You see, as much as we like to claim our moral superiority over the political right, it ultimately doesn’t mean anything at the end of the day.
Those on the right like to bend or break the rules to suit their whims and then use the power gained to reshape the rules in their favor. They use every…
