Living the Rule of Law: A Lesson for Trump’s Supporters
Behind Donald J. Trump’s media and legal fight over vote counting is the representation of politics not as the place where liberty, democracy and collective interests should prevail over discretion, arbitrariness and corruption, but where bullies always win, where what counts is contingency and not a vision, and where the rule of man, and not the rule of law, is the principle leading the lives of millions.
From Plato and Aristotle to the American Revolution, for hundreds of years philosophers, lawyers and politicians have reflected upon how to oppose a tyranny and the corrupt regime that characterises it. The answer lays in the rule of law. The idea here is that no one, not even those in power, are exempt from respecting the law. The law, not the man, governs lives and determine their fates. This principle is very much reflected in Plato’s few words from The Laws, where the Athenian Stranger claimed that gods smile only on cities whose law “is despot over the rulers and the rulers are slaves of the law.” In Politics, Aristotle dug deeper in this sentence of Plato’s by opposing the rule of law to the rule of man as corresponding to the dichotomy reason versus desire, mirroring the fact that “the capacity of passion is not present in the laws, but every human soul necessarily has it”.
When Trump and his supporters claim that vote counting should be stopped in a state but continue in another, they invoke the force of the rule of man, which they see as coinciding with their prominent political interests, over the rule of law embodied in electoral regulations and procedures. The claim their desire to win is more important that the votes of some of their peers. They believe that political victories and power grabbing are legitimate only when it’s them who must benefit from it and that political adversaries are enemies with no rights in the political arena. They despise democracy to the point of supporting the idea that a person could hold the most powerful office in the world for an entire mandate without the need of verifying their democratic legitimacy to the last vote.
We know very well what happened here. According to Business Insider,
[…] Trump’s initial lead in the states where he wants ballot counting to stop has either significantly narrowed or been overcome by Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. On Wednesday afternoon, Biden won Michigan […] and other major news outlets.
Trump-supporting protesters chanted “Stop the count!” outside a vote counting center in Detroit, Michigan on Wednesday. Meanwhile, other Trump-supporting protesters shouted “Count that vote!” outside a ballot-tallying facility in Maricopa County, Arizona.
In Michigan and Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign is calling for “meaningful” access to the ballot-counting process, claiming that it doesn’t have sufficient means to oversee ballot tallying and look over ballots that have been counted.
It’s clear that asking to count all the votes is not just an exercise of democracy as it is the recognition of the importance of being equal under the law. By claiming that Detroit’s counting center should stop counting while asking to continue counting in Maricopa County means attributing a different weight to the former’s citizens over the latter’s, dividing the electoral body in classes with different political entitlements. This can make sense only in a world where the government obeys to the law of man and not the rule of law, where the President in office decides whose votes are worth considering and whose aren’t, and where the ruling majority has the right to ignore and even crush any minority they dislike. You don’t need to be a constitutional lawyer to see how disruptive this is for the equal treatment of all citizens, and how subversive it is for the current American constitutional and legal setting.
The appointment of Supreme Court judge Amy Coney Barrett is also a great representation of power-grabbing by leaders who loathe democracy and the rule of law. Amy Corey Barrett was appointed not because she is good at law (she is “the most inexperienced person nominated to the Supreme Court since 1991”; also, who says “sexual preference” in 2020?, come on), but because her values are aligned with those of President Trump’s supporters: anti-abortion, anti-LGBT, pro-religion, pro-financial capitalism. This is perfectly fine in a country ruled by the rule of law but becomes an absolutely ridiculous stance when the same people in power implicitly claim that appointing a new Supreme Court judge during the last year of the presidential mandate is fine for them but wrong if the appointee is supported by their political adversaries and the president in office is a Democrat. Sound constitutional arguments cannot become a practice just for people in power and not for others, this is arbitrariness at its zenith.
Reason vs. desire, remember Aristotle?
The count-the-vote-stop-the-vote dynamics teaches us an important point about the rule of law: laws serve not just those who like them as means of reason, but also those who despise them as useless and ultimately harmful. Populist leaders like Trump and their supporters have a very precise conception of law as a tool that serves the interests of those in power and forget about all the rest. To use the law books to bully, repress and suppress is not an issue for them, as they see no limits to their powers once they have been given much.
The problem is that these leaders have access to power through democratic elections as much as anyone else. Too often do we blame the political and legal system with its own imperfect, old-fashioned and even rusty mechanisms, shaming the rule of law for permitting subversive groups to take over. When will we consider that it is exactly these leaders and their supporters that we should hold accountable for their despicable actions and statements? We should cry it out loud: it’s not ok to say stop the count in a state and say continue the count in another! It’s against democracy, and that’s why this view should not prevail. It’s the rule of man against the rule of law.
It’s fortunate we live in the latter.
