Flick 🇬🇧 on Nostr: https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/11/04/the-democrats-acceptable-election-denial/ ...
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/11/04/the-democrats-acceptable-election-denial/
What we saw from 2016 onwards was a spectacular effort to delegitimise a presidential election. A years-long effort to justify withholding losers’ consent. We saw the Democratic party-political elite, feeding dubious information to an all-too-receptive FBI, set out to deny an election. And throughout it all, the press cheered them on, eagerly colluding with power, rather than even attempting to speak truth to it.
Through their efforts to deny the 2016 election, politicians, state agencies and the corporate media did enormous damage to their own reputations and to the institutions of democracy in which the citizens put their trust. Countless polls show that from the Russiagate scandal onwards, public trust in the media and the political system plummeted.
What’s more, this grand, elite attempt to delegitimise Trump’s presidency paved the way for the ‘election denial’ we saw among Trump and his supporters after the 2020 election. Their claim that the political system had been rigged against them – that the 2020 election had been ‘stolen’ – resonated precisely because the Democrats, much of the news media and the state itself had indeed been out to get Trump for the previous four years – and they had even concocted a crazy conspiracy theory to make it happen.
What we saw from 2016 onwards was a spectacular effort to delegitimise a presidential election. A years-long effort to justify withholding losers’ consent. We saw the Democratic party-political elite, feeding dubious information to an all-too-receptive FBI, set out to deny an election. And throughout it all, the press cheered them on, eagerly colluding with power, rather than even attempting to speak truth to it.
Through their efforts to deny the 2016 election, politicians, state agencies and the corporate media did enormous damage to their own reputations and to the institutions of democracy in which the citizens put their trust. Countless polls show that from the Russiagate scandal onwards, public trust in the media and the political system plummeted.
What’s more, this grand, elite attempt to delegitimise Trump’s presidency paved the way for the ‘election denial’ we saw among Trump and his supporters after the 2020 election. Their claim that the political system had been rigged against them – that the 2020 election had been ‘stolen’ – resonated precisely because the Democrats, much of the news media and the state itself had indeed been out to get Trump for the previous four years – and they had even concocted a crazy conspiracy theory to make it happen.