Does democracy work?

Donald Trump’s hold over the Republican base was evident this week as Liz Cheney was ousted from her post as chair of the GOP conference. In a fiery speech that defended her repudiation of the former president’s Big Lie, Cheney warned that “Remaining silent and ignoring the lie emboldens the liar.” She claimed that Trump “has resumed his aggressive effort to convince Americans that the election was stolen” and that he “continues to undermine our democratic process, sowing seeds of doubt about whether democracy really works at all.”

As the party pushed Cheney offstage, the New York Times and Washington Post ran exposés of how Trump’s allies had pushed the Big Lie and identified and intimidated his critics. The Post detailed the operations of a company named Allied Security Operations Group which supervised a “quixotic attempt to find evidence of widespread fraud where none existed.” After losing the election “Trump was surrounded by those repeating claims [the original conspiracy theorist Russell] Ramsland had made …  and in seeking to overturn the election, Trump himself embraced some of those ideas.” Conservative media amplified the claims, convincing millions of Americans that the election had been stolen, and setting the stage for the raid on the Capitol.

The Times chronicled the work of a rightwing group called Project Veritas which recruited an ex-MI6 agent to run a sting operation that would discredit former national security advisor H.R. McMaster. The group also paid for “secret surveillance operations against F.B.I. employees, aimed at exposing anti-Trump sentiment in the bureau’s ranks.” The article showed how a “campaign once focused on exposing outside organizations slowly morphed into an operation to ferret out Mr. Trump’s perceived enemies in the government’s ranks.”

Across the Atlantic, less dramatic but no less damning stories have emerged about the conduct of former prime minister David Cameron. When grilled by the Commons Treasury Committee, Cameron showed little remorse for privately messaging serving Tory ministers no fewer than 56 times in four months, at the height of the Covid crisis. With a persistence that one of his interrogators described as “more like stalking than lobbying” Cameron pressed for government assistance to Greensill Capital, a firm that paid him handsomely and one in which he held a significant interest. Meanwhile, one of Cameron’s closest allies, Lord Feldman of Elstree, a former chair of the Conservative party, denied any impropriety in being part of meetings that led to government contracts worth £140 million. Shortly before the PPE contracts in question were awarded to a client of his lobbying company, Lord Feldman had served as an unpaid adviser to the UK health ministry.

Political scandals are useful reminders of democracy’s fragility. They show that any country can fall prey to political paranoia or shameless self-dealing. The fact that such scandals are aired, and those responsible duly shamed, should be taken as evidence that democracy can work, even when widespread misinformation and lobbying by text messages are the new normal. What distinguishes successful democracies is not the absence of political mischief but the extent to which its perpetrators are exposed, and held accountable.