Threats to Democratic Stability: Comparing the Elections of 2016 and 1860

Stuart Chinn

In the wake of Donald Trump’s presidential victory this past November, many commentators discussed whether that electoral result could pose a fundamental threat to American democracy. Given the prominent role of identity politics in that election, given the particular attributes and liabilities of both presidential candidates, and given the surprising conclusion to the election, emotions unsurprisingly ran high in the immediate aftermath. At least in my own interactions with students in the constitutional law class that I taught in the Fall 2016 term, I was struck by two types of reactions that had not appeared as prominently in my recollection of other recent, prior presidential elections: first, there was a sense of deep personal loss, especially among those women who supported Hillary Clinton—the sense that this election was not just a verdict on the two candidates, but a verdict in some sense upon these particular women as well. Second, there was also a very personal and very concrete sense of threat among those students who fell within the constituencies that had garnered negative comments from Trump during the campaign.

Assessing how great a threat President Trump poses to American democracy is a thorny task. In the same manner as prior commentaries, however, I will undertake my own tentative examination of this question in this Essay. My analysis will be through a comparative-historical lens: namely, by comparing the election of 2016 to the election of Lincoln in 1860. The reference to the 1860 election for this inquiry is obvious enough: the victory by Lincoln did ultimately spark a fundamental challenge to the stability of American democracy in the form of southern secession and the Civil War. The basic aspiration of this comparative approach is to investigate whether some facets of the 1860 election may or may not find ready analogues in the present context and, accordingly, to draw implications from this comparison.