Opinion – Thomas L. Friedman: US elections made the country’s democracy dodge an arrow

You can defer moving to Canada. Give up calling the New Zealand embassy to find out how to become a citizen there.

Tuesday’s US election was truly the most important test since the Civil War of whether the engine of our constitutional system — our ability to transfer power peacefully and legitimately — remains intact. And it looks like he passed the test; a little wrinkled, but ok.

I’m still not close to giving the signal all right, declaring that never again will an American politician be tempted to run on a platform of electoral denial. But given the unprecedented degree to which election denialism has been elevated in these midterms and the way in which several prominent Donald Trump impersonators who put denial at the center of the campaign have been defeated, we may have deflected one of the biggest arrows ever aimed at heart of American democracy.

Sure, another arrow could hit at any moment, but the entire US electoral system — in red, Republican, and blue, Democrat states — seems to have performed admirably, almost ignoring the last two years of controversy, reducing it to it always was: the shameful fabrication of a man and his most shameless sycophants and imitators.

Given the threat posed by Trump deniers to the acceptance and legitimacy of our election, this was a big deal. It couldn’t have come at a better time, as the leaders of Russia and China manipulated their systems to establish themselves in power beyond previously established mandates.

In doing so, one of his arguments was to point to things like the January 6, 2021 insurrection in the US and the apparent chaos of our elections to say to its citizens, “This is democracy. Is this what you want here? “

Indeed, in May, during his speech to a graduating class at the US Naval Academy, President Joe Biden recalled when Chinese Xi Jinping congratulated him in 2020 on his election: “He said that democracies cannot be sustained in the 2020 century.” 21; autocracies will rule the world. Why? Things are changing so quickly. Democracies require consensus, and that takes time, and you don’t have time.”

For that reason, Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin — and Iran’s supreme leader now facing a women-led uprising — also lost on Tuesday night. Because the wilder and more unstable US policy, the less able we are to transfer power peacefully, the easier it will be for them to justify not doing so.

While election denialism took a beating as a winning message, though, none of the things that are still eroding the foundations of American democracy — and preventing us from actually accomplishing great, difficult things — are gone.

I’m talking about the way our primaries system, district manipulation and social media have come together to constantly poison national dialogue, constantly polarize our society into political tribes, and constantly erode the twin pillars of our democracy: truth and trust.

Without being able to agree on what is true, we don’t know which way to go. And without being able to trust each other, we can’t go there together. And everything that is big and difficult needs to be done together.

So our enemies would be wise not to consider us dead, but we would be even wiser not to conclude that because we avoid the worst, we will follow the best from here on out.

It is not alright

We are as divided coming out of this election as we were going into it. But to the extent that the Republican red wave has not manifested — especially in swing states like Pennsylvania, where John Fetterman won a Senate seat from Trump-backed Mehmet Oz, and in swinging districts like one in Virginia where Democratic Representative Abigail Spanberger was reelected, defeating another Trump-backed candidate—it was because enough independents and moderates Republicans and Democrats showed up to put Fetterman and Spanberger at the top.

“There’s still a viable group of centrist voters who, when they have a valid option — not everywhere, not always, but in some key districts — they assert themselves,” Don Baer, ​​who was communications director for the House, told me. White by Bill Clinton.

“I think there are still a lot of voters saying, ‘We want a viable center where we can figure out how to make things happen that can really help people, even if it’s not perfect or all at once. We don’t want every election to be existential.’ “

The challenge, he added, is “how do you scale that feeling and make it work in Washington on a regular basis?”

I don’t know, but if this election is a sign that we’re at least stepping away from the precipice, it’s because enough Americans still fall into this independent or centrist camp and don’t want to continue brooding over Trump’s grievances, lies and fantasies — which , they can see, are freaking the Republican Party and rocking the entire country.

They also don’t want to be handcuffed by conscientious ultra-left activists and are terrified of the spread of the kind of sick political violence that has just been inflicted on Nancy Pelosi’s husband.

We owe a huge debt to Republican Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and Democratic Representative Elaine Luria for keeping this center alive. The three helped lead the investigation into 6 January in Congress and were eventually forced out of office as a result.

But the message the committee sent to enough voters — that we should never, ever, ever let something like this happen again — certainly contributed to the absence of a pro-Trump wave in these midterms.