In November 2000, the Electoral College count deadlocked. For 36 days, George W. Bush and Al Gore clashed legally and politically. The Supreme Court ultimately helped Bush win.
America managed this struggle peacefully — beyond one Florida dustup, the “Brooks Brothers Riot,” when several dozen Republicans in khaki shoved a bit during a recount.
Today, America needs a petition drive affirming our willingness to accept this election’s outcome, no matter who wins — and promising to protest any irregularities peacefully. Even those convinced their side will never go violent should affirm this sacred principle.
Petitions have a proud history.
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton garnered a mind-boggling 400,000 signatures denouncing slavery before the Civil War. In 1982, a 6 million-person petition helped Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday become a national holiday. More recently, change.org helped 19 million demand racial justice after George Floyd’s murder.
True, many Americans fear this election is “the worst ever,” that “democracy is at stake” and that their opponents cheat. Similarly, Jimmy Carter called the 1988 campaign “the worst campaign I’ve ever seen in my lifetime,” while the New York Mirror reported “there seems to be just one opinion” about the 1852 campaign: “It is disgraceful to the country.”
A century ago, Republicans accused liberal Democrats, especially Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, of imposing a dictatorship. And when Martin Van Buren lost his reelection bid to the inexperienced William Henry Harrison in 1840, one Democrat, Dillon Jordan, wrote: “Truth and justice and our sacred Constitution lay prostrate and bleeding at the foots of fraud and falsehood.”
These historical resonances don’t make any particular critique untrue — just familiar. Some of today’s fury fits a broader cycle of managed conflict followed by acquiescence and reconciliation, culminating on Inauguration Day.
Elections are adversarial. But by demanding restraint, democracy asks citizens to respect the process — and the results.
Yet with this election so close, as rhetoric escalates, threats of violence loom.
We’re in a bad cycle. In addition to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, at least 19 were killed during the summer 2020 George Floyd protests, causing $2 billion in damage. And after campuses erupted over an issue 6,000 miles away, the academic intifada could boil over if Donald Trump wins.
While creating their own melodies, campaigns often echo past candidates too. While Donald Trump and Kamala Harris evoke that polarizing, three-time Republican nominee, Richard Nixon, in different ways, both could learn one common patriotic lesson from him.
Trump reminds many of “Tricky Dick’s” snarling, conspiratorial, rhetoric. One critic called Trump a “smaller, weaker Richard Nixon.”
Meanwhile, Kamala Harris’s good vibes campaign evokes 1968’s “New Nixon” campaign. Blaming the nation’s volatility on the Democrats, Nixon promised to “bring us together again.”
When accused of being too vague, Nixon’s campaign highlighted position papers addressing 167 issues. The New York Post urged Nixon to make it an even 170 “by adding Vietnam, the cities and civil rights.”
Whatever Nixon’s flaws, he respected the electoral process. In 1960, Nixon would have beaten John Kennedy if as few as 14,000 voters out of a record 69 million switched sides — or, as some speculated, had fewer corpses voted in Chicago and Dallas.
Privately, Nixon complained, “We won, but they stole it from us.” Nevertheless, on Jan. 6, 1961, Vice President Nixon duly certified the electoral vote, explaining: “In our campaigns, no matter how hard they may be, no matter how close the election may turn out to be, those who lose accept the verdict and support those who win.”
Similarly, on Dec. 13, 2000, an equally bitter Vice President Al Gore proclaimed, “Let there be no doubt, while I strongly disagree with the court’s decision, I accept it.” Conceding, Gore offered to meet George W. Bush “to heal the divisions of the campaign.”
Quoting Sen. Stephen Douglas’s concession to Abraham Lincoln that “Partisan feeling must yield to patriotism,” Gore affirmed “the honored institutions of our democracy.”
True, today’s social media-marred polity roots too many Americans in one set of truths, one over-arching narrative, while riling us up daily. And Americans are increasingly cocooned, politically, culturally and socially, avoiding people who vote differently. Moreover, Donald Trump is a uniquely polarizing leader.
Still, after Election Day, Americans must still live together and move forward in a treacherous world. We need calls — and petitions — for unity, civility and democratic legitimacy as passionate as every partisan’s denunciations of Harris or Trump.
After all, in a democracy, patriotism means loving your country because of its politicians sometimes, but despite its politics, always.
Gil Troy is the author of nine books on the American presidency, and the author of “To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream,”
