Winston Churchill remarked: “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.”

A core political challenge is how to transfer power from one governing entity to another, and from one generation to another, without periodic societal meltdowns. For all its warts, some form of democracy, with broad-based buy-in, has – so far – proven to be the only means of reliably doing this over decades and even centuries.

After Churchill had led the British to victory in the Second World War, and when he expected to be rewarded by a grateful electorate but instead was defeated in a general election, he peacefully left office, turning over the government to the socialist Labor Party.

The strident attempts by Trump and his acolytes to delegitimize the results of the November election, together with the willingness of the Republican party to amplify the lie that the election was stolen and to use this as the basis for a raft of voter suppression measures being driven through state legislatures, is a threat to all of us, Republican, Democrat and independent alike. In plain view, our electoral processes are being de-legitimized in the eyes of millions of voters.

Without a broad-based acceptance of the right of all to vote, with voting made accessible to all, and with the results respected regardless of the outcome, we will inch closer to those other forms of government that have been tried and have failed.

Nigel Calder
Newcastle