Doris Kearns Goodwin: People Voted for Democracy
At its most basic, the American people turned out to use this week's midterm elections to affirm American democracy, according to one very prominent author and historian.
The final results of Tuesday's elections are not yet known, as not the next majorities in both houses of Congress, but the so-called “red wave” which Republicans had promised clearly is not coming to pass.
The midterms also were the first national elections since Donald Trump and his supporters tried to illegally overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, resulting in the January 6, 2021, insurrection.
Voters chose to turn away from Trump and his coterie of election deniers and, instead, reaffirm the basic notion of American democracy, according to historian and best-selling biographer, Doris Kearns Goodwin.
“Democracy, I think sometimes we forget the simple definition. It’s a system of government that people can vote their leaders in or throw them out, which means you have to accept when you’re thrown out and you have to accept loss,” she said in an on-camera appearance on CNN. “The peaceful transfer of power, old George Washington started this, critical, Lincoln said the central idea when the Civil War was starting was that the idea was can a government exist, continue to exist, if the people who don’t accept the election, the Democratic South, decide to break up the union because they lost? He said, if that’s true, then democracy is an absurdity. That’s what we were facing now.
“The people who lost the election would not accept and it’s a fundamental problem for democracy. But people came out and voted on this. That’s what happened in the midterms,” she added.
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