In the U.S. Senate Chamber on January 6, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas led a futile Republican effort to challenge the 2020 election results that gave Joe Biden the White House and caused President Donald Trump to be the first incumbent president since George H.W. Bush in 1992 to lose reelection. Cruz argued that the counting of the Electoral College votes should be paused so that a bipartisan commission could be formed to investigate voting irregularities, similar to that which occurred back in 1877. These acts of election malfeasance, the Trump campaign and many in the Republican party claimed, robbed Trump of a rightful second term. For example, claims were made in the state of Arizona, where Biden won by 10,457 votes, but audits revealed that there were no widespread discrepancies. In a more widely publicized claim, Trump officials claimed that Georgia, which used voting machines from Dominion Voting Systems, claimed that the equipment was not secure and questioned their accuracy. Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia Secretary of State and a Republican, defended his state’s actions in a call with Trump and said that a hand count of the votes yielded virtually the same result.
These events provided the backdrop for a right-wing march on Washington, which quickly turned violent, as many saw the certification of the Electoral College as a political last stand for President Trump. Right up until Trump supporters began their altercations with Capitol Police outside the halls of Congress, President Trump continued to dispute the results of the November election and had encouraged his supporters to attend the rally in Washington. Soon after, a Trump-supported mob breached Capitol security and several people were able to enter the halls, even though the Senate was still locked in session.
Missing from the chaos and news of today’s insurrection in the U.S. Capitol, is some historical perspective. While many elections have been close, proven in part by the Bush-Gore election of 2000, where hanging ballot “chads” and a Supreme Court challenge handed George W. Bush the election over former Vice President Al Gore. Weeks of legal challenge to that election, despite political polarization, did not produce the kind of violence witnessed today. America’s worst election was that of the “Corrupt Bargain” of 1824, which was thrown into the House of Representatives. The vote in the House gave John Quincy Adams the presidency over Gen. Andrew Jackson, who had both the popular vote and the most electoral votes among the four candidates.
Republicans in Congress have referred to the election of 1876 as the basis for their objections and their infantile calls for an election commission in 2021. That disputed election, occurring just a few years after the end of America’s Civil War, was settled by a commission, with devastating results. The late 19th Century was a difficult, yet eventful time in American history, one both scarred by war and one where millions of slaves were freed by President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. This was the Reconstruction Era in American history, where a rather different Republican party convened to put the former Confederacy of the south back into the Union and grant those millions of enslaved persons the rights of citizenship and the right to vote. Naturally, these empowered Black voters overwhelmingly supported the Republican Party—the Party of Lincoln—and in doing so, registered to vote in large numbers. It was a time of political enfranchisement and social power for newly Black citizens. In contrast, the segregationist, southern anti-Reconstruction Democratic Party recoiled at not only their loss of power, but lamented the loss of their dominant political bloc, as well as the foundation of Southern economic power. This Reconstruction Era saw rebellion from the South in the form of the creation of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), which used violence and murder to intimidate African Americans and whites who supported Black civil rights. But by the 1870s, economic recession did significant damage to the Republican coalition, and the intimidation tactics employed by the white Southern Democrats allowed for a slight shift in political fortunes.
The two candidates for election in 1876 were Ohio Republican Governor Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden, the Democratic Governor of New York. While the campaign was nasty and brutal, the election was worse. Both parties resorted to election fraud. Republicans stuffed ballot boxes while Democrats intimidated Black voters to keep them from going to the polls. So when the votes were finally counted, it was chaos. Both sides claimed victory. Republican state boards rejected enough Tilden votes to give Hayes an Electoral College victory, even though Tilden had the popular vote lead. When states convened their electors, there were dueling slates of electors and conflicting returns sent to Congress. The resultant Compromise of 1877 forced the removal of U.S. military forces from Confederate States, began the construction of another transcontinental railroad, introduced legislation to industrialize the South—and most consequently—preserved the right to handle the large Black population in the South free from interference from the North. It dramatically elongated the long period of white supremacy in the South and allowed “Jim Crow” laws to dominate the region for more than a century. It was a national shame.
This was the precedent that Sen. Cruz was asking Republicans and Senate colleagues to follow. Cruz and Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri advocated to throw an election, which had numerous Court challenges and an overall rejection by the Supreme Court, into the hands of a “bipartisan” commission that ultimately would find no evidence of wrongdoing—all to preserve the last vestiges of Trump’s power. The election of 2020 was not the election of 1876. No ballot stuffing. No widespread voter intimidation. No dueling slates of electors. Nothing.
Thai people can learn two things about the American experiment from this outrageous attempt by a pro-Trump mob outside the Senate Chambers and from within by Cruz. First, democracy is difficult. Democracy involves the holding of periodic free and fair elections and abiding by the results of that election through the peaceful transition of power. When any stage of that process is broken or corrupted, democracy itself becomes imperiled. Trump’s attempted coup d’état was a threat to the American experiment itself.
Thai people can also look to the coup by strongman Phibun Songkhram in 1948 that cemented his legacy and forcibly removed Khuang Aphaiwong from office. It gave autocrats a blueprint on how to conduct future coups. A coup in America is unimaginable. During the tumultuous Civil War, the Confederate Army never got close to Washington, D.C., however the insurrectionist Trump mob took a giant step forward in undermining American democracy, parading through the halls of Congress, some carrying the divisive Confederate battle flag. Sadly, America took one small step toward what is a common occurrence in Thailand. Unprecedented.
