Republicans declare war on honest elections

[Bloomberg]( Follow Us [Get the newsletter]( Get Jonathan Bernstein’s newsletter every morning in your inbox. [Click here to subscribe.]( The dangerous Republican decision to portray more and more elections as inherently fraudulent, [described in detail]( by Greg Sargent in an important Washington Post column last week (and see [here]( too), is a mostly a new development inspired by former President Donald Trump. And yet there’s something familiar about it. And that’s bad news for democracy in the U.S. I’m not talking about earlier efforts to make it harder to vote in the name of fighting election fraud, which had its roots in long-standing complaints about systematic fraud in the days of machine politics. No, the reason this new focus of Republican politics may seem familiar is because it’s similar to the long GOP war on the media. And just as that effort was both bad for democracy and very successful, this one may well be, too. Complaints that the self-proclaimed “neutral” media are biased probably go back to the beginning of unaligned media, over 100 years ago, and are as natural as complaints by sports fans about umpires and referees. Close calls will sometimes go against one’s side, and humans are prone to jumping to conclusions about motives and systematic bias rather than accepting that the breaks sometimes just go the other way. What the “neutral” media does [certainly contains plenty of biases](, but those are not based in ideology or partisanship; to the contrary, the mainstream media often goes to great lengths to avoid anything that looks like partisanship. But because nothing is truly neutral, it’s easy for a political party to convince itself — by focusing on the choices that hurt them and ignoring the ones that help them — of partisan bias. And beginning in earnest with Richard Nixon’s presidency, Republicans have done just that, and with such consistency and vigor over the last 50 years that almost all Republicans and quite a lot of nonpartisan observers simply believe it is true. That is what Republicans are now beginning to do with [election administration](. It’s natural for each party to believe the other is more corrupt, and there are always a handful of true or at least true-ish anecdotes and cases to back that up (as long as one ignores the handful of anecdotes about one’s own party). And as it turns out, when true-ish cases aren’t available, pure fiction will suffice. Repeat it loudly enough and you wind up with a whole party convinced that there is no such thing as neutral election administration, and therefore any elections that are not run by partisan Republicans must be rigged against them. In some ways, this is a specific case of a more general theme many Republicans (and the occasional Marxist) adopt, insisting that neutral expertise, whether in government bureaucracies or scholarly work or anywhere else, is itself a fraud that’s simply covering for the partisanship hidden underneath. Those who espouse this outlook think of themselves as realists, but in fact it’s naive to think that all human motivations and interests, or even all political ones, are based on ideology or partisanship. Interpreting everything as if it was based on partisanship will tend to push anything else out of the political realm. Which will impoverish politics itself. “Neutral” institutions are never purely neutral; they just aren’t purely, or even at all, partisan. None of this is to suggest that political actors should invariably defer to neutral expertise. They should not. But demonizing the media, scientists or election administrators isn’t the way to keep experts from exercising too much influence. All these attacks on neutrality are bad for democracy, but attacks on election administration are particularly so. Representative government simply does not work if enough people don’t accept election results. And what the Republican war on the media teaches is that the more politicians and other visible Republicans pretend that elections are rigged frauds, the more everyone in the party will believe it. 1. Julia Azari at Mischiefs of Faction on [Sept. 11 and U.S. politics](. 2. Douglas L. Kriner at the Monkey Cage on the [limits on presidential war powers](. 3. Seth Masket and Amy Erica Smith on [running for office as a political scientist.]( 4. A.B. Culvahouse and Donna Shalala on the still-pressing need for implementing better [continuity-of-government plans](. 5. Katherine Tully-McManus on the increasing problem of [Congressional staff turnover](. 6. Harry Enten on [polling the California recall](. 7. And my Bloomberg Opinion colleague David Shipley with a memory of [what was lost in the Sept. 11 attacks](. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. [Click here to subscribe](. Also subscribe to [Bloomberg All Access]( and get much, much more. You’ll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. Before it’s here, it’s on the Bloomberg Terminal. Find out more about how the Terminal delivers information and analysis that financial professionals can’t find anywhere else. [Learn more](. You received this message because you are subscribed to Bloomberg's Early Returns newsletter. [Unsubscribe]( | [Bloomberg.com]( | [Contact Us]( [Ads Powered By Liveintent]( | [Ad Choices]( Bloomberg L.P. 731 Lexington, New York, NY, 10022