Will He Go?, by legal scholar Lawrence Douglas, is, at 120 pages, a slim volume focused on a single question: what happens if the 2020 US election delivers a narrow or disputed result favoring Biden, and Trump refuses to concede? This question will, of course, either be answered or rendered irrelevant in half a year. And yet, in my estimation, there’s at least a 15% probability that Will He Go? will enter the ranks of the most important and prescient books ever written. You should read it right now (or at least read this Vox interview), if you want to think through the contours of a civilizational Singularity that seems at least as plausible to me as the AI Singularity, but whose fixed date of November 3, 2020 we’re now hurtling toward.
In one of the defining memes of the past few years, a sign in a bookstore reads “Dear customers: post-apocalyptic fiction has been moved to the Current Affairs section.” I was reminded of that as Douglas dryly lays out his horror scenario: imagine, hypothetically, that a President of the United States gets elected on a platform of racism and lies, with welcomed assistance from a foreign adversary. Suppose that his every outrage only endears him further to his millions of followers. Suppose that, as this president’s deepest (and perhaps only) principle, he never backs down, never apologizes, never acknowledges any inconvenient fact, and never accepts the legitimacy of any contest that he loses—and this is perfectly rational for him, as he’s been richly rewarded for this strategy his entire life. Suppose that, during the final presidential debate, he pointedly refuses to promise to respect the election outcome if he loses—a first in American history. And suppose that, after eking out a narrow win in the Electoral College, he then turns around and disputes the election anyway (!)—claiming, ludicrously, that he would’ve won the popular vote too, if not for millions of fraudulent voters. Suppose that, for their own sordid reasons, Republican majorities in the Senate and Supreme Court enable this president’s chaotic rule, block his impeachment, and acquiesce to his daily cruelties and lies.
Then what happens in the next election?
Taking the existing catastrophe as given, Douglas asks: is America’s Constitutional machinery up to a challenge that it’s never yet faced, of a president who accepts democracy itself as legitimate only when he wins? Douglas concludes that it isn’t—and this is the book’s terrifying and non-obvious part. There are no checks or balances in the Constitution that will magically ensure a smooth transition of power. On the contrary, the design flaws of our antiquated system make a meltdown more likely.
OK, but then why hasn’t America’s Reactor of Democracy exploded yet (or at least, not since the Civil War)? Douglas spends a lot of time on historical parallels, including the Tilden-Hayes election of 1876 and the Bush-Gore election of 2000. In each case, he finds, collapse was averted not because of mythical safeguards in our rickety, Rube-Goldberg system, but only because the relevant people (e.g., Samuel Tilden, Al Gore) stood down, having internalized the norm that the national good required them to. But that’s precisely what Trump has telegraphed that he’ll never do.
The class of scenario that most worries Douglas runs as follows: just like last time, the election comes down to a few swing states, such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Crucially, right now all three of those states have Democratic governors and Republican-controlled legislatures … and there’s no clear law about which of the two (the governor or the legislature) gets to certify election results and send them to Congress! So suppose Trump has a slight edge on election night, Fox News calls the race for him, but then an avalanche of absentee or provisional ballots shift things in Biden’s favor over the following week. Can you imagine Trump or his supporters accepting the latter?
Or suppose that, on election day, Russian hackers cut off electricity or voter registration databases in Philadelphia or Detroit, via computer systems that we know they already broke into and that remain exposed (!). Hundreds of thousands are unable to vote; the Democratic governor orders a revote; the Republican legislature tries to preempt that by sending the original tally to Congress.
The final authority over election results rests with Congress. The trouble is, the Senate is currently under Republican control and the House under Democratic control—and once again, the Constitution and federal law provide no clear guidance on how to resolve a deadlock between the two on presidential succession (!!). So what if Michigan or Pennsylvania or Wisconsin sends two separate sets of election results, and (predictably) the House accepts one and the Senate accepts the other? And what if there’s no resolution by noon EST on January 20, 2021? Then by law, the Speaker of the House, currently Nancy Pelosi, becomes acting president. Can you imagine Trump willingly vacating the Oval Office if that comes to pass?
Douglas seems to have finished writing Will He Go? just as the coronavirus shut down the planet; he includes some comments about how that will massively exacerbate the above problems. Election officials expect a historic number of absentee ballots, from people—disproportionately urban—who will (reasonably) consider it unsafe to wait in line for hours in a room packed with hundreds of strangers. Alas, Trump has already told his followers that voting by mail is a scam to be fiercely opposed, never mind that he uses it himself. Worse yet, the laws governing mail-in ballots—the signature, the postmark, the deadline for receipt—are byzantine, open to interpretation, and wildly different from county to county. So again: imagine if mail-in ballots overturn what looked like a Trump win on election night. The 2000 Florida recount battle was tea and cookies by comparison.
Douglas doesn’t mention, because it happened too recently, the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests (and in rarer cases, vandalism and looting) set off by the horrific murder of George Floyd, and the often shockingly militarized response. But assuming the protests continue through the fall, they’ll of course give the Trumpists even more pretexts to meddle with the election, in the name of imposing “order.”
This is not a sound statistical methodology, but if I imagine a gong every time the US inches perceptibly closer to collapse—gong when Trump got elected, gong when covid made landfall and the states were abandoned to fight each other over medical supplies, gong when George Floyd was murdered and staid, conformist liberals suddenly became anarchists demanding the complete abolition of all police—well, the gongs seem to be getting more frequent! Almost as if they were building toward a gongularity that was, I dunno, sometime around November!
Douglas never mentions the prospect of a second Civil War until literally the book’s last sentence, but it’s the undercurrent of everything he writes—particularly given Trump’s frequent glorifications of violence, and his heavily armed base. Having spent his career studying American jurisprudence, Douglas is willing to guide our imaginations all the way to the precipice but not over it. Part of me still finds the possibility of going over unthinkable—although wasn’t the first Civil War similarly unthinkable until shortly before it happened?
If there is to be a Chernobyl-like meltdown of the Founding Fathers’ machine, at least it would retrospectively make sense of a lot that’s confused me in the past few years. As I’m far from the only one to notice, “my” side, the left, has seemed less and less interested in debate and discussion, and more and more eager to denounce, ban, shame, and no-platform. As just one example, out of hundreds that would serve, last week a 28-year-old analyst named David Shor was fired from his job for politely tweeting about an academic paper offering evidence that peaceful protests are effective at winning public support for progressive, antiracist causes, while violence is ineffective. Hopefully I won’t now be fired for mentioning this!
Of course every cause has its extremists, but the puzzle is that I know plenty of people who will eagerly join whatever is the shaming or firing campaign du jour. And many of those people strike me as friendly, insightful, honest, balanced, wise—at least when the topic is apolitical, as (alas) less and less seems to be these days.
Thought experiment: two protesters meet on a street, carrying huge signs that say “BLACK LIVES MATTER” and “ALL LIVES MATTER” respectively. Can you imagine the following conversation ensuing: “Ah, my good fellow, it looks like you and I are allies, sharing deeply compatible moral messages with the world … one of us merely focused more on a special case, and the other on its generalization! Shall we sit in the park to discuss our joint strategy?”
I guess it takes an Aspbergery STEM nerd even to ask why that never happens. To spell it out: both sides are deploying English words, not for what they explicitly assert, but as markers of tribal affiliation, of which side they’re on.
It’s much the same with “Believe Women.” “Believe all women, always?” asks our hapless STEM nerd. “Women are goddesses who never lie? Feminism is no longer the radical notion that women are people?” “No, you sexist asshat,” replies the normie. “It means listen to women, empathize with women, believe women, be on their side, be on our side. What about that is so f-ing hard to understand?”
Or consider the slogans now conquering the world: “abolish the police” and “defund the police.” “You mean fundamentally reform the police, right?” asks the STEM nerd. “Eliminate qualified immunity, bust the unions that protect abusive cops, get rid of military gear, provide de-escalation training, stop treating homelessness and drug abuse as law enforcement problems, and all those other no-brainers? But not, like, literally end all law enforcement, leave the 911 calls unanswered as machete-wielding rapists run free, and let gangsters and warlords fill the vacuum?”
“No, abolish the police means abolish the police,” reply the activists sternly. “You refuse to listen. You’re not our ally.”
Imagine a ragtag guerilla army encamped in the jungle, surrounded by a brutal occupying force and facing impossible odds, constantly on the alert for turncoats and spies and fair-weather friends in its midst. Would it surprise you if these guerillas had a macabre initiation ritual for new recruits: say, slicing off the tips of recruits’ fingers?
Now suppose you reckoned that truth and justice were at least 3/4 on the guerillas’ side, and so decided to join them. At your initiation, would you ask the guerillas if they’d analyzed whether finger-slicing actually leads to greater effectiveness in battle? Or, as you swore the oath of eternal allegiance to the cause, with one hand on your heart and the other on your Kalashnikov, would you add: “… assuming that we continue to represent Enlightenment values like science, free speech, and intellectual charity”?
When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, it suddenly became reasonable to take the side of the bloodthirsty Stalin. And it would’ve been praiseworthy for a Russian to say: “I now pledge my life to fighting for the Soviet government—even if, likely as not, that government will thank me afterward by sending me to the gulag for an invented crime.”
Five years ago, thousands of woke activists shamed me for writing about my teenage experiences on this blog, a few even calling for an end to my career. Especially if those activists emerge victorious from a turbulent 2020—as I hope they will—I expect that they’ll come for me again. (Well, if they get around to it. I’m nowhere near the top of their list.)
And yet, if Lawrence Douglas’s scenario comes to pass—if, for example, the 2020 election leaves Trump barricaded in the White House with his loyalists, while a duly elected government waits in limbo—then I pledge to render whatever assistance I can, and even risk my life if needed, for the same side that the woke activists will be on.
I’d rather not, though. As Douglas points out, the more overwhelming we can make Trump’s electoral defeat, the less chance that it ever comes to this.