The wages of political cowardice: Most expect further violence, many ready to use it
In the early 2010s, when I was a reporter for a small weekly newspaper in West Virginia, an official from the Philippines — who had come to observe our local elections to improve election security there — asked me a question that caught me off-guard.
“What do you do when you get death threats?” he asked.
“I don’t get death threats,” I replied, a little befuddled. “I guess I would call the police if I thought it was serious.”
He was very polite, but I got the impression he didn’t think he had much to learn from someone with so little experience.
And it was true.
I had lived my whole life in a relatively stable democracy, and there didn’t seem to be much risk of that changing. Elections happened. The loser conceded, at least after a recount. Pretty much everyone put bruised egos aside and acknowledged the legitimacy of the election.
He lived in a country where journalists get death threats all the time, where 85 journalists have been murdered since 1992, where in a few years Rodrigo Duterte would be elected, bringing a wave of censorship, violence and repression.
The last several years have shown me how naive I was. We elected a man who spoke much like Duterte. His refusal to concede defeat and his continuing lies that he won the election have been either tolerated or embraced by most of the Republican Party. A mob successfully stormed the U.S. Capitol, motivated by those lies, seeking to stop the peaceful transfer of power.
Worst of all, Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” was met with silence by the vast majority of GOP elected officials — nearly all of whom know better — even after Jan. 6.
A poll that surveyed opinions about the election and political violence in September and October, commissioned by the Frank Church Institute at Boise State University, shows the terrifying impact this silence has had.
Though a majority in Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming say political violence is never justified in a democracy, and 71% say the Jan. 6 insurrection was unjustified, a majority also say they expect further, similar violence.
The poll gives evidence that fear is justified. A quarter of Republicans in the region say Jan. 6 was definitely or probably justified. Three-quarters of Republicans agree with the statement: “Claims that the November 2020 U.S. presidential election had widespread election fraud, and the results were not decided fairly, undermine my confidence in democracy.”
This belief reflects a total failure of political leadership. U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson has come the closest to addressing the lies underlying the Jan. 6 violence, at least supporting a commission to investigate the event and a few other steps.
But it is completely shocking, and utterly morally indefensible, that not a single member of our congressional delegation has come home and spoken clearly to their voters: “There wasn’t voter fraud. I didn’t like the outcome of the 2020 election, but it was the legitimate result.”
That failure has allowed a cancer to grow. Half of Republicans in this region say the 2020 election was definitely not decided fairly. Another 19% say it might not have been, and another 7% aren’t sure.
Only 14% — one in seven — feel certain the presidential election was legitimate. Far more — one in four — believe the attempted insurrection was justified.
So you can see why, at the far-right Turning Points USA rally in Nampa in October — when a local man asked, “When do we get to use the guns?” — the audience applauded and an Idaho state representative said it was a legitimate question.
“How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?” the man asked.
Whatever else the members of our delegation have done in their long political careers, when historians write about them, this failure to simply acknowledge and tell the truth will be remembered as the most significant thing they did. Compromising their honesty to keep from endangering their place in the political system, they put the very legitimacy of that system in peril.
They know what the Big Lie can do. They saw it when they fled from the mob that stormed the Capitol.
But they have been too cowardly to stop it from happening again.