If 2016 has taught us anything it is that people define democracy as getting what they want. If they win an election, it was fair. If they lose, it was rigged. Democracy is in crisis, says the Left, because, from America to Britain to Italy and beyond, the people keep making the wrong choices.

Take the United States. Donald Trump’s victory was a surprise – we get that. It was narrow, for sure. And it was controversial – no doubt. But it happened. What ought to obsess the Democrats and the media is what he intends to do next. His cabinet choices suggest Trump will govern the way he ran, from the Right, and that he isn’t afraid of confronting the consensus on everything from climate change to relations with Russia. There’s so much to scrutinise.

Unfortunately, the Democrats and the media would prefer to engage in a ceaseless critique of his victory in the hope that it’ll go away. The latest claim is that Moscow swung the election. The CIA has apparently concluded that Russia hacked into Democratic email accounts with the specific intention of embarrassing Clinton and helping Trump win. Many liberals are convincing themselves that the election was fixed. The debate was distorted by “fake news”. 

The Republicans stole votes in the rust belt. And Clinton actually won the national popular vote – so can we re-run the election?! The answer is no, of course; but that won’t prevent millions from refusing to regard Trump as the genuine democratic choice.

The Republicans have every right to be angry about this. Perhaps Russia did try to affect the election, and that ought to be investigated and exposed. But there’s no evidence that they succeeded. WikiLeaks did not play a big role in 2016 – its revelations were small fry. 

The FBI, which resurrected claims that Hillary did something wrong with her email account, had far greater impact. And all that WikiLeaks and the FBI did was reinforce decades-old suspicions that Clinton is a liar. Her approval rating in October 2015 was about -19 per cent. By election day it was about -13 per cent. The scandals had very little impact.

Also, didn’t the Democrats employ a few dark arts themselves? Did they not stack the primary process to Hillary’s advantage? It’s surprising, too, that the Democrats suddenly care so much about the transparency of the voting process, having rejected Republican warnings about potential fraud for years.

But the Left isn’t big on self-awareness. Consider the campaign of Jill Stein, the Green presidential candidate, to recount votes in the states that swung it for Trump on the rather rude assumption that because he won he must have cheated. 

Trump won Wisconsin by a margin of about 27,000 votes; Stein got 30,000 votes there. Trump took Michigan by 11,000; Stein got 50,000. So there are at least two states that arguably were lost not because of a conspiracy by the Right but because of divisions on the Left. It was an old-fashioned political cock-up.

The militant Remainers are playing a similar game in the UK. They question not only the referendum result but the referendum itself. It doesn’t count, they say, because the Leave campaign lied. Leave would dispute that – but so what if they did? Have you ever known an election in which a politician didn’t fib? It’s up to the voters to play detective, and most of them are smart enough to sort the fact from the fiction. I have yet to meet the sucker who voted Leave to save the NHS.

David Fuller's view

I think Tim Stanley makes a number of interesting points in this article.  I also wonder why the democratic process is so frequently challenged.  Is it due to slow GDP growth and the disparities between incomes?  Is the political process being undermined by insufficient term limits and too much lobbying?  Or to sound like an old fogey, do we have too much social media?  If subscribers have any additional thoughts on this, I welcome your views.      

Here is a PDF of Tim Stanley’s article.