Good riddance to the ‘resistance’

People celebrate in New York’s Times Square — with boarded up shops in the background — the streets after it was announced that Democratic nominee Joe Biden would be the next US President. Picture: David Dee Delgado/Getty Images/AFP

It’s a time to heal, Joe Biden told the nation on Saturday night.

“To make progress, we must stop treating our opponents as our enemy. We are not enemies. We are Americans.”

Mr. Biden, as we well know, is of good Irish Catholic stock, his speeches sprinkled with the emerald argot of his heritage, a lush, hibernian wordscape of shenanigans and malarkey. But he’s an ecumenical sort too, so I know he’ll forgive a little cultural dissonance when I say that this may be one of the finest examples of chutzpah in modern political rhetoric.

For four years the bulk of his Democratic Party, a good deal of the permanent government and almost the entire cultural establishment of the country has treated the Trump presidency as an occupying enemy.

Lack of civic deference

Donald Trump’s election four years ago was not greeted with civic deference to the urgent primacy of national unity that is now demanded of him and his supporters. It was greeted with the formation of a “resistance,” a political insurgency that refused in practice, if not in formal fact, to accept the outcome of an election its candidate had lost.

The members of this resistance spent four years using every lever at their disposal — bureaucracy, law enforcement, Congress, news media — to thwart, disrupt and try to bring down the duly elected president.

People hold a pinata of US President Donald Trump as they celebrate Joe Biden being elected President. Picture: Josh Edelson/AFP

In the past six months, the country descended into an abyss of pandemic-driven misery and social unrest. Like any good revolutionary movement, the resistance seized its moment. It launched a sustained, rolling campaign of disruptive demonstration and street violence, all dutifully enabled by Democrat-controlled city governments and all conveyed helpfully by a cooperative media as “peaceful protest.”

If there’s a single image that captures the hollow hypocrisy of these pleas for unity and healing, it was one I witnessed on the streets of Manhattan on Saturday in the minutes after the television networks had anointed Mr. Biden president-elect: jubilant crowds dancing joyfully in front of stores that had been boarded up in advance of the election in case the result went the other way.

People celebrate in the streets before US president-elect Joe Biden delivers remarks from Delaware, in Times Square, New York. Picture: Timothy A Clary/AFP

It was a neat little tableau of the protection-racket ethos that has defined American politics for the last four years: Vote for us so we can dance and celebrate. Vote against us and we’ll burn down your business and steal your property.

Not the way to respond

Given all this — the rank hypocrisy, the antidemocratic, extraconstitutional campaign waged against the Republicans — it’s understandable that they should be disinclined to take up Mr. Biden’s generous offer of national conciliation. It’s entirely understandable that Mr. Trump should feel cheated, inclined to fight on, to cast doubt and discredit on the election and the corrupted establishment that helped produce it.

But they shouldn’t, and he shouldn’t.

There are always good grounds for concern about the outcome of a close election.

This year that concern is heightened by what can politely be described as the novel circumstances of the voting. It seems that Democratic officials and Democratic-appointed judges in the critical states used the pandemic as an opportunity to bend rules and decades-long norms of voting procedures to maximize turnout in ways that doubtless favored their party.

But it’s one thing to harbor suspicions. It is another to prove to a legal standard fraud or malpractice on a scale that would overturn enough votes to wipe out a margin in the tens of thousands.

Denouncing the official election results in all-caps tweets or throwing out unsubstantiated accusations at news conferences is not the way to respond to a defeat.

There’s another reason Republicans, even Mr. Trump, should resist the natural temptation to resist.

They don’t need to.

Assuming Republicans can snag at least one of the runoff elections in Georgia, a first-term president has been elected with a Senate controlled by the opposing party — only the third time that’s happened since voters began electing senators in 1914. Republicans also made substantial gains in the House and state legislatures.

Clear repudiation

The election was a clear repudiation of the progressive agenda for which Democrats had sought affirmation. At the same time it showed the contours of a new Republican coalition, built on widening support among diverse demographic groups and lined up in support of a new populist conservatism pioneered by Mr. Trump. If the president wants to, he could be back again to lead it.

Above all, perhaps, the result suggests the American genius for making pluralism work is undiminished even in these angry, contentious times.

President-elect Biden’s success seems mainly to have been the result of dissatisfaction with the president’s performance, especially on the pandemic. Voters did not regard Mr. Trump as illegitimate, and they didn’t reward the “resistance” by punishing Republicans down the ballot. That should be a lesson for Mr. Trump, his understandably disgruntled supporters, and all Americans.

The Wall Street Journal