My colleagues and I at the Institute have accepted academic responsibility to analyze and to chart America’s policy and democratic course. That mission has come to mind often as I continue to reflect on the implications of the January 6 Capitol Hill insurrection for this nation’s policy making and democratic health. That event was inspired by former President Donald Trump who has refused to concede his election defeat and whose Big Lie concerning that November 2020 contest has persuaded millions of citizens that the present United States chief executive, Joseph Biden, Jr., is not legitimate. This assertion is extraordinary on its face, but all the more so since it is absolutely and unambiguously without foundation. Nonetheless, Trump and other representatives of his Party continue to embrace and press that claim in their efforts to play to the fears and anxieties of their supporters and to marshal anger to support their quest for power.

In this they are hardly alone. The Fox news/entertainment network and a number of aligned website businesses do the same daily. Together, these entities have helped to create a situation in which not only the national election, but even events such as the mass murders of school children, have been twisted via lies into supposed partisan conspiracies of various stripes. Everything for the GOP and its media allies, increasingly, is about gaining power and harming the supposed “enemy,” understood as other U.S. citizens who disagree with whatever the Party or its leader’s line may be at the moment. Many individuals who countenance or otherwise apologize for this egregious situation often claim it to be merely the result of partisan differences. That view is a grievous misunderstanding of what is in play. This situation is not about honest good-faith disagreement about policy priorities or direction. Instead, it concerns whether a demagogue and his Party and allies can mobilize a sufficient number of citizens around lies and fabricated grievances to delegitimate the lawful outcome of a national election. Indeed, all who care about self-governance, irrespective of their partisanship, must now raise their voices to protect the political process that yielded that result and the quest for justice that must accompany it, or risk losing their democracy altogether.
    
I want to say this as clearly as I can and so repeat: This country is not facing a partisan disagreement or even, as Trump often suggests in his wild rhetoric, catastrophe, because his reelection was stolen from him by some unnamed and vague “them,” for whom the “Dems” or the “Libs” were purportedly responsible. Instead, the nation now confronts a continuing and sustained attack on its efforts to ensure a democratic way of life by the very Party, the GOP, that is feigning outrage over something that never happened. This fact, an abiding and cynically pressed paradox, can be too readily missed because there are so many efforts afoot by the Republican Party and its allies to obscure and trivialize its significance.