In an appearance last weekend on Real Time With Bill Maher, Ron DeSantis was asked why he campaigned in 2022 with election deniers like Kari Lake. DeSantis said, accurately yet revealingly, that he “wanted to see Republicans win key races.” Maher asked why that wasn’t “a deal-breaker” for him. DeSantis proceeded to point to Trump’s first election:
Well, let’s go back to 2016. Your friends in Hollywood were cutting ads telling the Electoral College to vote against Trump in the electoral college because it was “stolen.” They said Russia stole the election. For years, they said that. So don’t act like this is like this is a unique thing in modern history.
What happened in 2016? Hillary Clinton did not, in fact, attempt to steal the election. Instead she conceded the morning after the election, gracefully delivering a speech calling him the victor and wishing him success:
“Last night, I congratulated Donald Trump and offered to work with him on behalf of our country. I hope that he will be a successful president for all Americans. This is not the outcome we wanted or we worked so hard for, and I’m sorry that we did not win this election for the values we share and the vision we hold for our country.”
Clinton made no attempt whatsoever to overturn the election result.
It is true, as DeSantis says, that some cast members of The West Wing and other Hollywood celebrities cut an ad urging the Electoral College to vote against him. While perfectly constitutional — the Electoral College was originally designed to permit electors to make their own judgments, and not all electors were formally required to follow their state decisions — it was undemocratic and destabilizing. It was also not an idea that Clinton or the Democratic Party was proposing.
It is also true that some people on the left claimed, absurdly, that Russian hackers changed voting totals to elect Trump, but this claim was never used in any attempt to change the election result.
DeSantis’s comment is a good demonstration of the escalatory nature of whataboutism. The United States of America is a very large country. At any given time, there will usually be some far-out people on all sides saying or doing some crazy things. On a near daily basis, there are conservative talking heads calling for political violence or extra-constitutional measures.
If you can point to a crazy thing said by anybody who supports the other party to justify taking similar actions on your own, then the baseline of morally acceptable behavior would plunge quickly, as each party immediately adopts the most dangerous or extreme measures advocated by the most unhinged supporters of the other side. Political conflict would quickly escalate to civil war.
Maher, sadly, did not point out any of these things. DeSantis’s campaign considered this exchange such a clear win it tweeted out the video.
The most persuasive account of how healthy democracies backslide into authoritarianism shows that the key actors are political allies of authoritarians, “semi-loyal democrats” who choose to endorse their anti-democratic actions because they care more about power than democracy.
DeSantis is a textbook example of a semi-loyal actor. Preserving democracy would mean, at the most minimum level, refusing to try to elect allies of Donald Trump who continue to endorse his attempt to secure an unelected second term. But by pointing to a kooky idea a handful of celebrities cooked up, DeSantis justifies his disgraceful collaboration.
