In a report published just prior to the US presidential election, the International Crisis Group was pessimistic. ‘The 2020 US presidential election presents risks not seen in recent history. It is conceivable that violence could erupt during voting or protracted ballot counts. Officials should take extra precautions; media and foreign leaders should avoid projecting a winner until the outcome is certain.’
The Crisis Group also feared the threat posed to US institutions. ‘Beyond the implications for any Americans caught up in unrest, the election will be a harbinger of whether its institutions can guide the US safely through a period of socio-political change.’
With Joe Biden securing the electoral college votes necessary to win the White House, the concern is whether the transition of power will be one marked by paroxysms of rage and disruption. Donald Trump is promising not to go quietly. Failing in the numerical stakes, he is now fighting the election in the courts. He is also crafting a narrative, unfounded in facts, that will endure with his supporters: that the election was stolen and that mail-in ballots were corrupted.
To state that the United States is divided has become a quotidian remark. What is less understood is the nature of US democracy itself. Far from being a democracy, the US is a republic, conceived as a bulwark against direct democracy and monarchical institutions. It was also the creation of white, privileged slave owners keen to preserve propertied values in the face of possible insurrection. To have embraced direct democracy, warned the sceptical Founding Fathers, was to embrace a political model that would eventually lead to tyranny.
Foremost among them was the second US president John Adams, who remarked in a letter to John Taylor in December 1814 that, ‘Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhaust and murders itself. There never was a Democracy Yet, that did not commit suicide.’
Preferable, then, was a separation of powers model focused on checks and balances, one that would contain factions and prevent any seizure of power by any particular one. As James Madison wrote in the tenth essay of the Federalist Papers (1787), ‘Among the numerous advantages promised by a well-constructed Union none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction.’
The existence of the electoral college is a case in point. An institutional, anti-democratic firebreak meaning that the popular vote has failed to carry the