When Power Trumps Principles: Not Accepting An Election's Outcome

Trump's Klown Kar Koup Attempt

    As I sit writing this, overlooking the whitecaps on the storm-lashed Bali Sea, Donald Trump has yet to accept the undeniable fact that he lost the 2020 US presidential election.  In doing so, he suffered the ignominy of being one of only 4 incumbent presidents to have lost their bid for re-election in the past century, and to have lost by a wider margin than any incumbent since the hapless Herbert Hoover in 1932, during the depths of the Great Depression.  Joe Biden won 306 electoral college votes to 232 for Trump, coincidentally the same margin (but in the opposite direction) as in 2016, a result that Trump declared numerous times was "a landslide".  The electoral college is a bizarre, outdated and anti-democratic system that is long past its use-by date, but it's the way elections work in the US.  In the more easily understood popular vote, Biden won by more than 7 million votes (81.3 million to 74.2 million).  US elections since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 are generally thought to be reasonably free and fair, and despite decades of Republican claims of widespread voter fraud involving thousands or millions of votes, no credible data has ever been advanced to bolster these arguments.

    Instead of bowing to reality, Trump has spent the past 5 weeks clinging to increasingly unhinged fantasies of how he will overturn the election and how the results were manipulated to steal victory from him.  For anyone who has followed Trump's entire career as a real estate developer, a reality-TV host and a politician, this comes as no surprise.  Trump is a firm believer in the power of positive thinking (Norman Vincent Peale, the guru of this quintessentially American "prosperity gospel" school of religion, officiated at Trump's first wedding in 1977), and as such is physically and psychologically unable to accept reality when it conflicts with his own deeply held beliefs.  He has a long history of refusing to accept baldly obvious facts, starting with his calling for the death penalty for the Central Park Five in 1989 and continuing to publicly proclaim their guilt even when they were exonerated and another man confessed to the crime.  His statements about easily verified facts like the crowd size at his inauguration, or his often repeated boast that he had passed the Veteran's Choice Act (it was signed by President Obama in 2014) follow the same pattern of disregarding any aspect of reality that conflicts with his ego and its beliefs.

     So far Trump's attempts to overturn the election have been crude, clumsy and spectacularly unsuccessful.  He has asked for recounts and audits of the vote in various states and counties (none has resulted in overturning a statewide result, and some have even resulted in an increased vote margin for Biden).  He has launched a barrage of increasingly desperate and frivolous lawsuits presented by a rogue's gallery of incompetent and delusional figures such as Rudy Giuliani and Sidney "Release the Kraken" Powell; so far, his team has a 1-55 won-lost record.  He has tweeted and retweeted increasingly untethered conspiracy theories about how the election was stolen from him, and intimidated the vast majority of Republican senators and representatives into not accepting that Joe Biden is the president-elect (a Washington Post survey found that of the 249 GOP elected members of Congress, only 27 were willing to state publicly that Biden won; 2 stated that Trump had won, and 220 were unwilling to answer the question either way).  He has tweeted at, telephoned and denounced in speeches state and county officials responsible for administering the election and certifying the results, trying to get them to overturn the electoral outcomes in their areas.  He has whipped up a frenzy of hatred and denunciation of these officials, many of them Republicans such as Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia and his secretary of state Brad Raffensperger.  One Republican election administrator in Georgia, Gabriel Sterling, gave an impassioned and angry speech denouncing the president's campaign of vilification and the resulting threats of violence online against some of his workers.  Armed militia members appeared outside the home of Jocelyn Benson, Michigan's secretary of state, chanting "stop the steal!", late in the evening.  Trump attempted to have Republican members of the Michigan state legislature overturn the results in Michigan, and to have county commissioners in Michigan refuse to certify their vote totals.  He continues to try to get various states, including Wisconsin, to refuse to send the electors chosen on November 3 to Washington to participate in the formal election in the Electoral College.  He continues to try to obstruct all efforts to ensure a smooth transition to a Biden administration, although his loyalist Emily Murphy, the head of the General Services Administration, finally bowed to the inevitable three weeks after the election and released funds to start the transition period.  His latest stunt is backing a lawsuit from the Texas Attorney General to overturn the election results in 4 other states, an attempt that makes less than zero legal sense.  (Note:  Since I started writing this post, the Supreme Court has dismissed this case, bringing the score to 1-57.)

    Trump's efforts have failed miserably so far, but not because Americans have risen up en masse to reject this attack on its democratic institutions; recent polls have shown that a majority of Republican voters now believe that the election of Biden was illegitimate and achieved through widespread fraud.  Instead, Trump's incompetence, indiscipline, laziness and lack of preparation, combined with his selection of remarkably ill-prepared lawyers, have doomed his efforts.  Trump's efforts to overturn a clear electoral loss by intimidating those administering and overseeing the vote are unprecedented in US elections in both the 20th and 21st centuries, and represent an enormous breaking with the unwritten norms that underlie much of the United States' democratic system.  By attempting to discredit the entire process, and by convincing so many of his own party's supporters that the election was "stolen", Trump may well have done irreparable damage to the body politic that will not heal itself magically once he storms off the national scene.  It will be much harder in the future to hold together a country where a sizeable minority of voters are angry, conspiratorial and increasingly untethered from reality.

    This entire sorry spectacle, and the prospect of future political mayhem and possible violence over the next month and a half, and stretching much further into the future, has prompted me to think about comparable situtations in other countries, both in the present and in the past, and what lessons might be drawn from them that might be applicable to the United States in late 2020.

A Distant Mirror:  Lessons From The Distant Past

    Democracies and republics have historically been rarer than monarchies and autocracies, and have historically been prone to instability, decay and eventual overthrow.  Ancient Greece's city states have always served as a model for modern Western democracies, particularly in the US, so it is worth looking at the case of Athens.  Athenian democracy traditionally was said to have been instituted by Solon in around 594 BC, but it was overthrown by Peisistratos in 561 BC and ruled as a tyranny by him and his son Hippias in 510 BC.  Upon the expulsion of Hippias, Athens reverted to a democracy (of free male citizens, so a limited democracy, but a political system with widely distributed power nonetheless) and remained so for the next century.  There was a coup in 411 BC to establish an oligarchy, but that only lasted a few months before democracy was restored.  The loss to Sparta in the Peleponnesian War in 404 BC resulted in another oligarchy being established, but that lasted only a year before democracy was once again re-established.  The conquest of Athens in 338 BC by Philip of Macedon was the death knell for democratic government in Athens, as the city lost its independence and was absorbed into the Macedonian Empire and subsequent Hellenistic kingdoms and empires before eventually becoming part of the Roman Empire.  The takeaway lesson from Athens is that democracies rise and fall, change their forms and sometimes expire entirely depending on internal and external forces.  There is nothing about a democracy that prevents it from dying out from within, or being overthrown from without.  Democracies and republics are not inherently immortal.

    The Roman Republic provides another ancient example of democratic republicanism that didn't end well.  Traditionally the Republic was said to have begun with the overthrow of the last king, Tarquinius Superbus, in 509 BC, although as historian Mary Beard points out in her magisterial book SPQR, much of what we are told about the early years of Rome was only written down much later, and often conflicts with the archaeological record or other historical sources.  Whatever the case, it probably lasted as a republic for nearly five centuries until Octavian established the Roman Empire in 27 BC.  This sounds like a pretty promising timeline from an American point of view (it's been only 241 years since George Washington was inaugurated as the first US President), but it should be pointed out that for the last century of its existence, the Roman Republic was on life support.  A system of government that worked tolerably well when Rome was a small city state, or even when it was establishing its rule over most of the Italian Peninsula, proved unfit for purpose when Rome became the overlord of most of the lands surrounding the Mediterranean.  Economic inequalities, social tensions between the plebs and the patricians, the vast estates worked by slaves that ended up crushing the class of independent freehold farmers, the unimaginable riches that flowed into Roman patrician families from its overseas provinces and allies, and the never-ending zero-sum competition between wealthy senatorial families for power and glory; all of these factors combined to destroy the Republic gradually between the time of Tiberius Gracchus (133 BC) and Julius Caesar (assassinated in 44 BC after winning a civil war).  Mike Duncan, the creator of the seminal History of Rome podcast, wrote a book a few years ago about this period, particularly between Tiberius Gracchus and the death of Sulla in 78 BC.  Titled The Storm Before The Storm, it traces the steady erosion of the norms and unwritten rules that governed the Republic over the course of decades.  Actions that would once have been unthinkable became commonplace, and any pretense of cooperation between rival factions in the interest of the broader society was abandoned.  Rome was ruled by dictators and riven by repeated civil wars that ended only when Octavian defeated Mark Antony and unified power in himself as the first Roman Emperor.  The increasing polarization, extremism, corruption and violence in Rome over the course of those decades bear an eerie similarity to events in Washington DC over the past quarter of a century, since the rise of Newt Gingrich's scorched earth policies in the House of Representatives.  The book is well worth a read, and the lesson to be drawn from this period is that as countries change, old institutions may no longer be capable of ruling in a fair and prosperous manner.  Unwritten norms play a huge role in the smooth functioning of a democracy, and if a ruthless ruler arises who feels unconstrained by such norms, a republic can fall apart surprisingly quickly after centuries of survival, rotted out from the inside.

    Republican democracies (or at least broadly distributed oligarchies) fell out of fashion in Europe for the millennium after Octavian became Augustus Caesar, but they began to re-emerge in northern Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.  One of the best-known republics was that of Florence, established sometime in the twelfth century.  It was never a really stable form of government, with factional conflict between the Guelphs (loyal to the Pope) and the Ghibellines (supporters of the Holy Roman Emperor) a constant feature.  There were coups and purges and violent conflict throughout the early years of the Florentine Republic.  By 1432 the wealthy Medici family established themselves as the pre-eminent power in the city, ruling through money, influence and patronage without dispensing with the outward forms of republicanism.  There were occasional setbacks, such as Savanarola's brief theocratic reign in 1494, and subsequent non-Medici rule until 1512, but the Medicis came back and by 1530 had decided to dispense with the fiction of a republic.  Alessandro de Medici was the first "Duke of the Republic of Florence", and by 1569 the city became officially part of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany.  Republicanism had died out in the home of the Renaissance.  What can we learn from this example?  Perhaps that an excessive concentration of wealth in the hands of a single family can undermine a republic.  The Medici just had too much money and power to allow any other family to have a turn ruling the city.  It's a bit like the case of Georgia today, where the vast wealth of Bidzina Ivanishvili allows him to dominate the political landscape of a small country, not allowing any other political forces their chance to rule.

The Fascist Decades

    The first half of the twentieth century was enormously turbulent in world affairs.  The broad European peace that had lasted since the Battle of Waterloo had continued (bar a few revolutions and recurrent wars around the edges of the decaying Ottoman Empire) until the outbreak of World War One in 1914.  That war and its aftermath shattered central Europe into numerous new countries, and left Germany as a defeated colossus under a new democratic system of government.  The Weimar Republic was a well-designed system of government, but it was imposed on a country filled with economic devastation and a large mass of aggrieved nationalists convinced that they had only lost WWI through betrayal (the "stab in the back" narrative that permeated right-wing discourse throughout the Weimar period).  Last year I read Benamin Carter Hett's book The Death of Democracy, about the fall of the Weimar Republic, and it painted a chilling picture of a political system paralyzed by left-right feuding, buffeted by political street violence between rival gangs of political supporters, viewed as illegitimate by large parts of the population who longed for a return to the Kaiser and to military glory, and undermined by an unscrupulous populist demogogue who provided a politics of grievance, of demonization and of a return to greatness.  It took only a month for Adolf Hitler's Nazis to take over all the levers of government once they had been let in by other right-wing politicians who viewed Hitler as a fool, but one whom they could use to further their own ends.  It took only the Reichstag Fire and a determined (and probably pre-planned) Nazi response to it to kill off the Weimar Republic after 13 tumultuous years.  The lessons and parallels with the United States from 2016 to 2020 are fairly clear:  populist demogogues are dangerous to systems and very hard to control, and political systems collapse quickly when they have been demonized and delegitimized from within beforehand, especially if there is a large mass of the population that believes in a myth of betrayal and treachery.

    Perhaps a less obvious figure to consider in this rogues' gallery of anti-democratic historical figures is that of Juan Peron, president of Argentina from 1946 to 1955 (and again in the 1970s, when he was a sad, senile figure).  Argentina had been plagued by instability since achieving its independence from Spain in 1816, with the country ruled by a succession of strongmen.  In 1943, a democratically elected government was overthrown by a military junta that included Colonel (later General) Peron.  He was put in charge of the Ministry of Labour, and he was able to parlay popular measures in this field into large-scale political support among the working class of the country.  He made it easier for labour unions to organize in large companies, supported workplace reforms that improved safety, reduced working hours and gave end-of-year bonuses to employees.  His popularity and obvious political ambitions led to an attempt to dismiss and arrest him in late 1945, but street demonstrations led to him being freed.  He rode his popularity among trade union members (as well as resentment at US government interference in the election in favour of his opponent) to victory in a democratic election in 1946.  He ruled for 9 years, winning re-election in 1952 with the staunch support of working-class Argentinians and opposed by the right wing, the US, British industrialists and Argentinian businessmen.  He accomplished a great deal in making Argentinian society more equitable, with the proportion of GDP going towards workers' wages rising from 41% to 49% over the course of his time in office.  His second wife, Eva "Evita" Duarte, was instrumental in granting the vote to Argentinian women. However, he also sowed the seeds of future economic malaise by spending money on slightly hare-brained national prestige projects (like a nuclear fusion powered aircraft that never flew) and encouraging imports that wiped out a substantial trade surplus.  He ruled by a combination of currying favour with workers, intimidating and persecuting opponents, controlling the press and personalizing all power as a classic Latin American caudillo.  He was an admirer of both Mussolini and Hitler, and there were definitely elements of fascism in his governing style.  He was overthrown by the army halfway through his second term as president and fled into exile.  Peronism survives to this day, and the current president and vice president are Peronists.  What can Peron teach us today?  If a ruler appeals to the working class in a way that connects emotionally with them, he (or she) can do well electorally even if most of his (or her) other policies are ineffectual, repressive or ridiculous.  Just as Peronism has long outlived its founder, Trumpism and its appeal to the bigoted Archie Bunkers of his base may last for decades.

Modern African Parallels

When I spent two youthful years living in Tanzania with my family in 1981 and 1982, African democracy was almost a contradiction in terms.  No sub-Saharan country had seen the peaceful transfer of power from a defeated president to a duly elected successor in the two decades since independence.  That began to change in the 1980s, and by 2000 there was a sense of a real African democratic renaissance.  Numerous one-party states converted themselves into vibrant democracies, and the winds of change seemed to be blowing in the right direction.  The past decade, however, has seen one-time youthful reformers cling onto power, overstaying term limits as they age into decrepit autocratic dinosaurs, manipulating elections, constitutions and the political process to remain at the helm long after they should have been put out to pasture.  Let's have a look at a few recent cases, as they all have features that are relevant to Trump in 2020.

    Yoweri Museveni was a young reformer when he came to power in 1986 at the head of a military rebellion against the bloodstained regime of Milton Obote.  Aged 32, he stated that “The problem of Africa in general and Uganda in particular is not the people but leaders who want to overstay in power,” He ruled for ten years before the first post-war democratic elections were held in 1996.  He won with 75.5 percent of the vote.  In 2001 he won re-election with 69 percent, but his losing opponent, Kizza Besigye, appealed to the Supreme Court.  The court ruled 3-2 that while the election was not free and fair, the scale of the irregularities was not enough to invalidate the election.  In 2006 Besigye stood again, but was arrested a few months beforehand and only released as a result of international pressure.  Museveni won 59 percent of the vote, and again the result ended up in the Supreme Court, which ruled 4-3 that the election was deeply flawed, but declined to overturn the result.  He won again in 2011 and 2016, with 68 and 61 percent, with Besigye standing as his main opponent both times.  Now aged 76 and having amended the constitution to remove age limits on the presidency, Museveni is running for a sixth term with his main opponent a 38-year-old musician named Bobi Wine who is very popular among the huge number of Ugandans under the age of 30.  Wine has been arrested several times, injured while in police custody severely enough to be sent to the United States for medical treatment, and been shot at by police (his driver was killed).  He is currently out on bail after his arrest for flouting covid-19 restrictions, and more than 50 of his supporters have been killed by police in demonstrations against his detention.  He has announced the suspension of his campaign because of the scale of the government violence against his supporters.  The takeaway message from Uganda is that if you have the police and the courts and the security forces on your side, and are ruthless and unscrupulous enough, you can win elections by rigging them and not face any consequences (Uganda is viewed as a key Western ally in security matters, and a poster child for successful poverty reduction).  Trump would very much like to be as successful at subverting the democratic system.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo held long-delayed elections in late 2018.  The outgoing president Joseph Kabila backed the candidacy of Emmanuel Shadary, while the pre-election polling leader was the candidate of the united opposition Martin Fayulu.  The election was delayed by a week after a fire in a warehouse destroyed 8000 voting machines.  When it did take place it took a long time to tally the results; finally, twelve days after the election, Felix Tshisekedi, the son of a longtime opposition figure, was declared the surprise winner.  Election observers, including the influential Roman Catholic church, called fraud, saying that the official results did not at all match the tallies observed at individual polling stations.  Fayulu appealed to the Supreme Court, but the court upheld the election results and Tshisekedi was sworn in as president.  There were strong rumours of a backroom deal between Kabila and Tshisekedi, since Kabila realized that nobody would believe a result which showed Shadary winning, and he did not want to see the main opposition alliance win.  The key point in this DRC election is that whenever results are not seen as free and fair, there will be rumours of underhanded dealing, in which case it helps to have a pliable Supreme Court to find in your favour.  I think that Trump was counting on the Supreme Court to bail him out of a loss, and is shocked that (so far) they have refused to help him out.

Zambia was a poster child for democratic reforms in Africa.  After decades of single-party rule after independence under Kenneth Kaunda, there were a series of elections regarded as free and fair, starting in 1991, with an orderly handover of power.  The country showed excellent economic growth, was granted debt relief and was doing well on measures of social progress.  All that has changed dramatically since 2015.  In October 2014 the president, Michael Sata, died in office, leading to an election to replace him that was won by Edgar Lungu, who narrowly edged out his rival Hakainde Hichilema.  Lungu served out the final 18 months of Sata's term and then took on Hichilema in a re-run vote in August of 2016.  I was in the country at the time, and saw Lungu's election campaign workers running rallies in the middle of nowhere, handing out free T-shirts and bags of corn flour to entice voters.  The results took a long time to tally, and Lungu was finally declared the winner; his 50.32 percent of the vote was just enough to avoid a run-off second round, and many observers questioned the likelihood of the numbers.  Hichilema protested and appealed to the Supreme Court, which granted him extra time to prepare his case only to then reject his appeal because he had taken too long.  In 2017 Hichilema was arrested and charged with treason.  The two candidates are likely to square off again in 2021 with another close vote expected.  Lungu's government has generally governed with an authoritarian bent, with a sharp increase in corruption and foreign debt, with the country recently defaulting on a bond payment.  He seems determined to use all the resources of the government to perpetuate his rule, to the detriment of the political system, the economy and society.  Trump would love to have an obedient Supreme Court, and to be able to arrest his opponents, and to massage the results just enough to retain power.

    After three downers, I'd like to finish with a slightly more hopeful example.  Museveni and Lungu benefit enormously from the advantages of being incumbents, with all the power of the state at their disposal to tilt the scales in their favour.  Tshisekedi wasn't an incumbent, but he seems to have been the beneficiary of the help of the incumbent.  Trump is shocked that he isn't able to use the power of his office to make it impossible for Biden to win.  This last example is of a particularly brutal incumbent and his inability to cling on to the presidency.  Yahya Jammeh was president of Gambia, mainland Africa's smallest country, a tiny strip of land along the Gambia River in West Africa, completely surrounded by Senegal (and a small Atlantic coast).  Jammeh was the president of the country from 1994 to 2017, and in that time he became immensely wealthy while most of his citizens lived in the most abject poverty.  He came to power in a military coup, but then won elections in 1996, 2001, 2006 and 2011.  His regime was like a cartoon image of an African dictatorship:  opulent wealth for Jammeh and his family and cronies looted from the state through rampant corruption; repression of the opposition, media and NGOs; batty ideas (including about how to cure AIDS with homebrewed herbal concoctions, as well as actual witchhunts); rampant homophobia; and brutal violence, including widespread torture and several accusations of rape against the president.  In December 2016, to everyone's surprise (especially his own), Jammeh lost his bid for a fifth term to the challenger Adama Barrow.  After initially conceding, Jammeh withdrew his concession and annulled the result, calling for a new election.  He filed a suit with the Supreme Court (sound familiar?) and then appointed five new justices to the bench.  He continued with various legal and political manoeuvres, including declaring a state of emergency, until the regional security alliance ECOWAS announced that they would intervene militarily to enforce the results of the election.  Jammeh fled into exile in Equatorial Guinea with as much loot as he could carry and Barrow was inaugurated as the new president.  This story has a happier ending, but only because bigger, more powerful regional powers refused to tolerate Jammeh's shenanigans.  Perhaps DRC, Uganda and Zambia are too big for their neighbours to interfere, or perhaps their regional alliances are more tolerant of anti-democratic moves by their members.  At any rate, it shows again the power of having a captive Supreme Court and military power, and the importance of outside countries supporting free and fair elections and the peaceful transfer of power.

Latin America

    The countries of Latin America are no strangers to electoral controversy, contested results and even coups d'etat.  Two recent examples that come to mind here are events in Venezuela over the past 22 years, and the fall of Evo Morales in Bolivia in 2019.  Looking at Venezuela first, it has been a painful fall from grace economically and politically for a country that was once among the richest countries in the region thanks to its huge oil reserves.  In 1992 Hugo Chavez was the leader of an attempted coup d'etat against the elected government; at that point Venezuela had been a democracy since the overthrow of a military dictatorship in 1958.  Chavez's revolt failed and he spent two years in jail.  Once he was released, he pursued power at the ballot box and was elected as president in 1998, 2000, 2006 and 2012.  He pursued populist economic policies that were popular among the poor, but made him a figure of loathing among the middle and upper classes.  He set about restructuring politics and society, starting with constitutional reforms in 1999.  His Bolivarian Revolution, executed by neighbourhood committees loyal to his party, rather than through the legislature (the National Assembly), weakened the constitutional powers of the legislature and centralized power in an executive that bypassed the usual channels of control.  As a result, his party was free to pursue policies that ultimately led to hyperinflation, the collapse of the Venezuelan currency and widespread hunger and destitution, particularly under his successor, Nicolas Maduro.  

    Faced with widespread street demonstrations among the middle classes, Maduro's government has responded with police repression.  At the same time, he has bypassed the legislature with a parallel Constituent Assembly elected under dubious conditions, and has ruled by executive decree.  He was re-elected in an election in May 2018 that was widely regarded as neither free nor fair, and many countries, most notably the United States, refused to recognize his legitimacy.  The leader of the National Assembly, Juan Guaido, was recognized by the US, Canada and the majority of countries in the EU as the legitimate ruler of Venezuela, but despite US sanctions and economic pressure, Maduro has managed to remain in power and has in the past week seen his party sweep almost all the seats in the National Assembly elections that were boycotted by almost all opposition parties.  The results leave Maduro and his PSUV party in complete control of all avenues of political power.  Maduro has been able to face down US and European condemnation of his rule, as well as widespread popular anger at the calamitous economic situation and skyrocketing rates of street crime; in this he has been helped by support (both political and economic) by countries such as Russia, China, Turkey and Iran.  The difference between Jammeh and Maduro seems to be that Maduro is genuinely popular among the large numbers of workers and poor people in the country, as well as having control over the media, the economy and security forces, and so is able to win elections despite the fervent opposition of the once-prosperous middle classes.  Populist policies sometimes are really popular, and having all the levers of power in his hand gives Maduro a huge incumbent advantage.  

    In contrast another once-popular economic populist, Bolivia's Evo Morales, discovered in 2019 the limits to incumbent advantage.  First elected in 2006, he won re-election in 2009 and 2014.  Morales, the first indigenous Aymara to lead the country, was similar in his policies in many ways to Chavez.  He rewrote the constitution in his first term using (like Chavez) a Constitutional Assembly in which his party, MAS, won a majority of seats.  His new constitution decreed a two-term limit (starting with the adoption of the new constitution) and emphasized dignity and social rights for the poor while limiting regional autonomy.  There were large, violent demonstrations by inhabitants of the wealthier eastern departments calling for a greater degree of autonomy, but in the end Morales' new constitution prevailed.  Morales survived a recall referendum (which was trying to remove him from office) and remained popular among the majority of Bolivians (particularly the indigenous Aymara of the highlands and the working class in the cities) for most of his 2009-2014 term.  His government increased the social safety net, improved education for the poor and pursued policies to help lift many Bolivians out of poverty.  During his 2014-2019 term, however, the lustre started to come off his rule, especially when he began attempts to run for an unconstitutional third term.  He lost a referendum on this issue, but then took a case to the constitutional court arguing that term limits violated basic human rights.  The court agreed and let him run again.  

    The election was very closely fought.  There were multiple candidates, and the top two would advance to a second round unless one candidate won an absolute majority, or else had a lead of more than 10% over the second-place candidate.  On election night Morales was leading, but not by enough to secure a first-round victory.  Then the electoral commission stopped updating results for 20 hours.  When this unexplained pause was over, updated results showed Morales suddenly just over the 10% lead required to win the election outright.  The opposition immediately cried foul and alleged that the vote totals had been tampered with during the 20-hour hiatus.  There were massive street demonstrations for nearly three weeks before Morales suddenly fled into exile.  A caretaker administration was sworn in with promises of holding new, fair elections.  An attempt to rig the vote had been defeated by street protests.  Or had it?  The new administration, led by Jeanine Anez, proved to be very right-wing in its policies, and citizens soured on it quickly.  Charges of sedition and terrorism were laid against the exiled Morales; they were widely viewed as baseless and politically motivated and were dropped in October of 2020.  There were new elections in October, 2020, found to be free and fair by international observers, and the MAS candidate Luis Arce won an outright majority in the first round.  Morales returned from exile the following month.  Researchers differ in their findings as to whether Morales had committed fraud or not in 2019; the Organization of American States as well as two American researchers found evidence of fraud, while another group of American academics found no evidence.  The events of 2019 might have been, as Morales alleged, a coup.  At any rate, in a deeply divided country, an attempt to claim a fraudulent victory may fail in the face of determined popular opposition, particularly if the incumbent has made himself less popular in the runup to the election.  (Sounds familiar in the American context here!)

Post-Soviet States

    The 15 states of the former Soviet Union differ greatly in the degree to which they have democratized since 1991.  The Baltic states have joined the EU and are regarded as being fully functioning democracies.  Other countries such as Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are tightly controlled and repressive autocracies.  Belarus and Russia are generally thought of as resembling the second group, while Ukraine is a bit closer to the Baltics.  All three provide object lessons in elections and their outcomes.

    Vladimir Putin has dominated Russian life since he first came to power in 2000.  After two terms as president, constitutionally unable to run for a third term, he became prime minister for four years and changed the government into a more prime-minister-led affair.  Then in 2012 he took his old job back and changed the constitution so that presidential terms lasted 6 years instead of 4.  In early 2020 more constitutional changes were rolled out to make him eligible to serve as president until 2036.  Russian elections and referenda are not regarded as free and fair, with the government heavily restricting who can run, arresting some opposition figures and assassinating others (like Boris Nemtsov and, unsuccessfully, Alexei Navalny).  Popular protests in Moscow and St. Petersburg are quickly quashed, and the government's vote totals are widely regarded as fictitious, with Putin's candidates usually hovering around the 78 to 81 percent range in vote shares.  Occasionally an opposition figure will win a seat in parliament or on a city council, but they are restricted in what they can accomplish and are sometimes subject to government harassment.  Putin tries to keep his finger on the pulse of the nation and tries to roll out popular policies whenever popular discontent seems to be rising.  His government is widely seen as deeply corrupt, with Putin himself said to be a multibillionnaire.  It's hard to see Putin handing over power voluntarily, and he will likely leave office the way Lenin, Stalin, Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko did:  carried out feet first by undertakers.  Putin seems to be a master of using all the legal, military, security and economic powers of the state not just to stay in power, but to become very wealthy and prevent any other figure from becoming a threat.  He has personalized power relations in the style of a Big Man leader in Africa, and it is hard to see him ever allowing free and fair elections, or falling to popular protests.

    Ukraine's Viktor Yanukovych, on the other hand, has twice  been forced to concede power by popular protests.  In the 2004 elections to succeed Leonid Kuchma, he ran against Viktor Yushchenko who was poisoned and nearly died during the campaign.  Yushchenko and Yanukovych advanced to the second runoff round of voting, and the results were widely disbelieved amid reports of large-scale electoral fraud in the east of the country in favour of Yanukovych.  After nearly two weeks of protests in Kyiv, (the Orange Revolution), the results of the second round were annulled and a re-run ordered, won handily by Yushchenko.  Yanukovych won the next presidential election in 2010 and ran an administration noteworthy for its close relations with Russia and for its spectacular corruption.  In 2014 Yanukovych was forced from office after months of protests in Maidan Square in Kyiv against his corruption and his pro-Russian stance.  He fled into exile in Russia after being removed as President by a parliamentary vote.  This removal from office was thought to be a direct trigger for Russia's invasion of the Crimea and eastern Ukraine a month later, as Putin saw Ukraine being reoriented towards Western Europe and wanted to cripple Ukraine in retaliation.  Putin escaped largely unscathed from these illegal invasions and saw his popularity within Russia skyrocket.  Perhaps the lesson to take away here is that popular uprisings against dodgy elections and kleptocratic would-be autocrats can succeed, but they may result in a country suffering vengeance from a more powerful neighbour who would like to keep the country in their geopolitical orbit.

    Belarus is a strange candidate for a people-power uprising.  Easily the most repressive regime in Europe, Alexander Lukashenko's government has ruled with a Soviet-style iron fist since his first election in 1994, running on a populist anti-corruption platform.  Since then he has been re-elected in 2001, 2006, 2010 and 2015 in elections regarded by foreign observers as heavily rigged.  His vote totals in those elections were reported to be Putinesque: 76%, 84%, 80% and 84%.  Opposition and civil society groups have been hounded throughout his rule, and their members arrested or beaten by police.  So when the 2020 elections rolled around in August, very few people expected anything different from the previous rubber stamp exercises.  How wrong they were!  In the campaign, various opposition candidates were harassed or arrested or barred from participating, including Sergei Tsikhonovskii.  His wife, Svetlana Tsikhanovskaya, agreed to run in his place.  Unlike in previous years, there were numerous demonstrations against the banning of candidates, and these demonstrations continued despite police crackdowns on protestors.  When the election finally took place on August 9th, there were huge queues at Belarussian embassies abroad as expatriates cast their votes.  In the days leading up to the polls, various opposition rallies were banned and campaign staff were arrested.  

    The official results stated that Lukashenko had won 80.1 percent, while Tsikhonovskaya was a distant second with 10.1 percent.  This was in line with previous results, but unlike in previous elections, the citizens of Belarus refused to accept what seemed a completely ludicrous result.  Vote tallies from individual polling stations were posted and photographed, with many in Minsk and at embassies abroad showing Tsikhonovskaya either even or well ahead of Lukashenko.  Internet initiatives invited voters to photograph both sides of their ballots and submit their photos.  Over 1 million photos of votes for Tsikhonovskaya were collected, nearly twice her official tallies.  Demonstrations and clashes with riot police began almost immediately in Minsk and elsewhere.  Tsikhonovskaya was arrested, forced to read a statement calling for her supporters to accept the results, then driven into exile in Lithuania.  To the surprise of almost everyone in the country, especially Lukashenko, that was not the end of the affair.  Instead, every week for the past 4 months has seen large and noisy demonstrations against the stolen elections.  Ordinary citizens, including grandmothers, factory workers and bureaucrats, have turned out week after week despite violence and torture meted out by riot police which have resulted in several deaths of demonstrators.  The determination of citizens to have their voices heard is one of the most inspiring things I have seen since the famous incident in Tianmen Square where a man with a shopping bag stopped a column of tanks from moving in to kill student demonstrators.  One of the most memorable videos from Belarus I have seen shows a factory manager telling his workers that Lukashenko has won the election, only to be heckled and shouted down by the workers, who tell everyone who voted for Tikhonovskaya to stand up; almost everyone gets to their feet.  I don't know what will happen in Belarus; I hope that the extraordinary bravery of the demonstrating citizens eventually results in meaningful change, but I fear that Vladimir Putin will never allow a regime change in a country that he regards as really an appendage of Russia.  I hope that it doesn't end in a bloodbath, but it's hard to tell.  This sort of permanent standoff between the government and hundreds of thousands of citizens who feel cheated may be coming to the US, except with Trump's supporters in the "feel cheated" camp.  I don't know what has made this year different in Belarus; perhaps its the brazenness of the cheating, or the fact that the evidence of fraud was so clear.  Stay tuned to see what happens.

The Big One:  India

    India is the last example I want to look at.  There are no blatantly stolen elections to point at in India, but unlike most of the examples given above, India is a huge country with a vibrant democratic culture.  Unlike its neighbours Pakistan and Bangladesh, it has never been under military rule; the biggest constitutional crisis since independence happened in 1975, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency that lasted for nearly 2 years, in response to a wave of strikes and demonstrations.  The worry in India is that it is heading in a fundamentally anti-liberal majoritarian and sectarian direction under Prime Minister Nahendra Modi and his BJP party.  Modi has stoked the Hindu nationalist right against Muslims and other religious minorities, a direction unsurprising in someone whose rise to national power was founded on his involvement in the 2002 Gujarat anti-Muslim violence that left over 2000 people dead.  Modi has steadily eroded the independence of the press and encouraged violence-mongering hate speech among his followers, while slowly capturing organs of state power such as the courts, the police and the Electoral Commission.  These are now used preferentially to harm political opponents and shield Modi's allies.  Social media in India is now even more vitriolic than in the US, with huge armies of trolls deployed to shout down, threaten and silence government critics.  There is a real danger that India is drifting inexorably into a one-party Hindu chauvinist illiberal authoritarian state.  The collapse of the once-dominant Congress Party has left the coast clear for this sort of takeover, and many liberally minded Indians are justly fearful about the future of their country.  This is a big deal:  India will soon be the most populous country on earth, and to have 1.4 billion people slip out of the democratic column would be a devastating blow to the worldwide democratic project.  Modi is a very able political operator, in exactly the way that Donald Trump is not, but the general drifts of the BJP and the US Republican part are in a similar direction:  towards less liberty, dispensing with the annoyance of having to win free and fair elections, coddling a base motivated by bigotry, xenophobia and religious extremism.  If the Republican party were to continue in a Trumpian direction but under a more competent, calm leader, an American equivalent of Modi, the 242-year experiment in democratic republicanism in the US might well come to a quick end.  As the line once went about elections in eastern Europe in the aftermath of World War Two under the baleful eye of the Soviet Red Army:  "One person, one vote, one time!"  I hope that this does not come to pass in the US or India, but it's hard to be definitively certain.

Final Thoughts

    So what can we learn from all these examples?  Every country is different in culture, economic circumstances, history and political system, but the general lesson that I draw from these comparisons is that the United States, which has for a long time regarded itself as the leader of the free world, a "shining city on the hill" which inspires citizens of other countries in their struggles to achieve greater individual liberty, an exception to the historic arc of rise and decay that affect other nations, has definitively lost its place in the regard of the rest of the world.  In place of a positive role model to others, it has seen its democratic culture decay over the past 26 years, since the rise of Newt Gingrich, to the point where today one of its two main political parties has declared openly that the results of elections are to be overturned if they point to a victory for the other side.  This places the US closer to Bolivia, Venezuela, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Gambia, Belarus or Russia than would have been conceivable twenty years ago.  I am not an American, but I find it sad to see such a large proportion of the American population happy to turn their backs on the ideals of democracy in favour of naked power, and to take a conscious choice to ignore reality, science, logic and all the intellectual progress since Galileo in favour of believing what some random person says on a YouTube video.  The US is in for more dark times, and I can only hope that it doesn't take the rest of the world down with it in the process.