How Do We Accept the Process When We Don’t Like the Results?

If you have access to it, look at an interesting article the Atlantic published last week by Katy Osborn and Scott Warren titled, “The Voters Who Believe That Trump Defends Their Values.”

They write that those fearful that President Trump is hostile to democracy comfort themselves with the thought that “Once voters fully grasp that democracy is under threat from creeping authoritarianism, then surely they will turn against Trump.” Nevertheless, they argue, “this strategy has largely fallen flat.”

Osborn and Warren’s main claim is this: those pursuing that strategy “are defending largely abstract democratic processes, such as norms and rules, on the assumption that everyone agrees that they are legitimate and worth saving. But such arguments are unlikely to resonate with voters who have come to believe that many of these norms and processes have abandoned the country’s bedrock values.”

Let me address this claim by starting with an analogy to baseball. According to Britannica, “In the 2024 season the Chicago White Sox finished with 121 losses, which set a new Major League Baseball record for most losses in a single season. The previous record of 120 losses had been set by the New York Mets in 1962.” We might ask, how did they even manage to suit up each day?

Nevertheless, whether we’re talking baseball or politics, the key to the integrity of the game is to know, believe, and have confidence that, yes, you win some and you lose some. If you lack that confidence, however, fans will defect from baseball and, more dangerously, from the political process. Neither baseball nor politics works if competitors lack the confidence that they will win at least some of the time.

Look, though, at a few political facts. Imagine being a Republican in the city of Chicago. By one measurement, “about 64% of voters vote Democratic and 36% Republican.” How do Chicago Republicans get out of bed any given day? Similarly, by another source, Republicans amount to 8.42% of registered voters in Massachusetts. At the same time, Wyoming Democrats face the fact that Republicans are 77.23% of registered voters. How do Wyoming Democrats get out of bed any given day?

Now, consider the question of what defines or determines “the better team.” Yes, at times we hear sportscasters and fans argue that the better team didn’t win. The question, though—leaving aside their won-loss records—is how we know what determines which team is the better team. Strictly speaking, on any given day the game winner is, by definition, the better team.

If the fair or just outcome is defined by whatever the process produces, then the claim that “the better team lost” cannot be true in those terms. Or is the fair or just outcome defined independently of whatever the process produces, such that one could argue that the process might not produce the fair or just outcome?

In these terms, Osborn and Warren write that “the central question for the conservatives we met is not ‘Should America be a democracy?’ Instead it is: ‘Has American democracy remained faithful to what makes it legitimate?’ Democratic institutions are legitimate, in the view of conservatives, when they honor and protect the faith, freedom, families, and communities of their constituents. When institutions and the politicians who inhabit them fail to appreciate the centrality of these core values, they become illegitimate.”

In other words, if you come to believe that the process never works for you—that it’s not the case that while you lose some you do win some—you might well conclude that it’s only the score (i.e., the end result) that matters, and not the game (i.e., the process). If you start to believe that democracy doesn’t work for you, then you become vulnerable to Trump’s claim that “I am your retribution.”

Put differently, if you’re unsuccessful long enough, how long can you remain committed to the principle that it’s not whether you win or lose—it’s how you play the game. The Osborn and Warren argument appears to be that MAGA supporters have moved beyond that principle to the point that democracy is less important than the substantive ends or results they seek.

Thus, one view is that the purpose of political processes, including democracy, is to pursue and bring about certain substantive goals and values, and we judge the legitimacy of those processes by whether they achieve those goals and values.

The other view, however, is that the purpose of political processes, including democracy, is to enable us to live together with people who have different, and sometimes drastically different, substantive goals and values. Politics exists, where it does, precisely because people do have substantial differences.

Yes, we can say that processes are the means to the ends, and that we should never sacrifice the ends to the means. However, if we disagree about the ends that should be binding on all people, then, to avoid violence, the ends—our goals and values—shift to creating the conditions for enabling people with competing and inconsistent ends to live together peacefully.

Politics in this sense, as I have maintained frequently, is the process of creating and maintaining an agreement to disagree. With apologies to mathematicians, broadly speaking there is no agreement to disagree in mathematics—you’re either right or you’re wrong. That might work for math, but it cannot work for politics; it is the denial of politics.

In that case, all we have left is “I am your retribution” and the violence that will inevitably accompany that claim; there goes the peaceful transfer of power that’s characterized American politics except in the case of 1861.

For those who imbibe, perhaps now is the time for a good, stiff drink.

[My next column will appear in two weeks.]

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