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I agree that this question should definitely be asked here. The dissident right doomerism (which mirrors the 2016 Sanders whining) reminds me of my black/white thinking depressive episodes. It's a kind of justification, not a logical argument. What the right wants to do, just like what Sanders wanted to do, is difficult. Being an outsider is difficult. It is a political miracle for Trump-aligned right-wingers that Trump is electable, when every historical precedent would suggest otherwise. There will probably never be anyone like him in our lifetimes. The fact that he closely lost an election to a former Democrat Vice President under a fairly popular administration should not cause people to spiral so hard. It's an emotional reaction to a very normal possibility that your preferred outsider candidate can lose.
I happen to strongly believe that the election was not stolen, but I imagine that the people here who do also want to live in a high-trust society. My question for those people is, what does it mean if you're wrong about the election? If you learned for a fact the election wasn't stolen, and you had been shouting otherwise, you'd be forced to consider how you contributed towards lowering societal trust by lowering its faith in our democratic process unnecessarily. It's been totally reckless for the right-wing to jump on this boat with so little meaningful evidence. For all I hear about high-trust societies here, that aspect of things, the fact that the right-wing very loudly questioned an election that was very likely totally fine, seems to me to have massively increased distrust. And again, if they're wrong, then what was it all for?
I personally can't answer this, because I've always believed that none of the POTUS elections in my lifetime were stolen, 2016, 2020, 2024, and heck, even 2000. But there's a big leap in logic here in your statement. Let's posit that I'm correct that the 2020 election wasn't stolen; this doesn't imply that there was no good reason to believe that it was stolen. Sadly, our world isn't a clean and easily legible one, and it is often the case that there are many good reasons to believe things that turn out to be false. As such, it can be entirely reasonable to believe that questioning the election was necessary, even if it resulted in lowering our faith in our democratic process. Given that, it also appears to me that the reaction to the questioning was the actual point of lowering faith in our democratic process.
So the question actually hinges on whether it was reasonable to believe at the time that any of these elections were stolen, rather than whether it was the actual case that they were stolen.
I think that's a fair point, I could probably have targeted my critique more precisely. You could make a parallel to the "russia hoax" where Trump made it very much appear that he was a Russian asset, moreso than he really was. How much do we blame Democrats for going rabid because of that? I think ideally the democrat media would have been more measured and patient, and the temperature on everything could have stayed more reasonable while the professionals did there work, and I think an honest Democrat who engaged in any over-the-top accusations would reflect on that behavior as ultimately net-negative.
It is possible that bad behavior is so obvious that the rabble rousing is correct, but I should have clarified my point which is that when it is a failure, like it is here, those who were in the thick of it should acknowledge it, and move towards acting with more prudence if they realize the evidence wasn't quite so open and shut as they thought. If what I believe is true, then a very large amount of social trust was lost with little provocation from the party that supposedly highly values social trust. That party should reflect on that if it's being honest with itself.
This is really the issue to me. The institution that has positioned itself as the arbiter of partisan agreements no longer does their job with any commitment to the truth.
The reason there are so many unanswered questions about seemingly suspicious behaviors on election night 2020, is that there was never a good-faith effort to investigate those questions. If election skeptics thought something fishy happened at a vote counting center after observers were sent away, the reporting on such a claim amounted to "The people counting the votes said 'No, nothing fishy happened.' Therefore, it was the fairest and most secure election in history." Narrative buy-in won over actual investigating, which was never going to convince the skeptics and only pander to those who wanted the skeptics to be wrong regardless of the truth.
I agree that the mainstream media environment is not trustworthy and I don't go for them for unvarnished truth. But again I think there's a good comparison on the other side, so many on the left believe that Trump can never be right about anything, so they believe the opposite of whatever he says, which creates a huge blind spot that ultimately degrades societal trust. It can be a similar problem regarding what the right believes about mainstream media.
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If I learned for a fact that it had zero effect on the election, I would still not regret mentioning to people that I think it's very bad that the clerks of the two largest counties in Wisconsin encouraged people to lie on election forms to avoid providing identification and a large number of people did exactly that. I can imagine this washing out to zero actual difference, but it's still very bad and I'm not the one bringing social trust down by noticing that. Even if this (and the million and one other examples of violations of clear law with Covid as justification) had no effect, I would still favor restoring trustworthy elections where people vote in person with identification.
The question is how much noise and populist rage does this justify, and does it justify the language that has enabled people broadly to believe in much more conspiratorial takes under the umbrella of "the election was stolen". For instance I think it is a very good thing that that effect was much more muted after Al Gore lost, and the adults in the room encouraged moving on, at least much more than in this case where believing the election was stolen is a requirement to be a part of the Trump admin.
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