As Alexis de Tocqueville famously observed, unlike Europeans, if Americans “want to proclaim a truth or propagate some feeling . . . they form an association” rather than turning to the government.
Over the past week, that insight has been on full display. Organized citizen-groups converted the election result from a presumption Trump intended to rebut to a hard truth he could not bluster away.
The National Council on Election Integrity, a bipartisan group of former government and civic leaders, ran a “We Did It” TV ad campaign congratulating Americans on a secure election despite the global pandemic. The rule-of-law Republicans at the Lincoln Project announced plans to run ads naming law firms litigating unfounded election fraud claims, thereby triggering a series of lawyer withdrawals.
