let's say you're right

A lot of people think there was no "steal" in 2020. For these people, hatred of Trump is enough to explain what happened. Biden was, for these haters, untested as president and thus glowing with potential, despite a nearly fifty-year record of being in Congress and doing jack shit, all while being caught in lie after lie (class rank, Corn Pop, jobs he'd supposedly had, plagiarism scandals, etc.). So if there was no steal, and 81 million people (not counting the dead, the illegals, the way-late absentee ballots, etc.) really did vote for Biden, this means half the country truly is stupid. If, on the other hand, there had been a steal in 2020—and there's plenty of evidence of shenanigans, from the sudden appearance of all-Biden 3 a.m. ballots to mass reports of duplicate signatures to polls where people blocked out the windows and sent the poll watchers home while votes continued to be counted—then maybe a large proportion of the population got hoodwinked, including left-liberals who would have changed their votes had they known earlier about, say, the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.

Let's suppose, though, for the sake of argument, that the There Was No Steal crowd is correct. If they're correct, then a couple things should be clear: (1) according to all the projections I'm seeing, including from statistician Nate Silver himself, Trump ought to win decisively this November. He's dominating battleground/swing states, and with RFK Jr. in the mix, the tide turns even more in his favor. (2) I'll be wrong, and the electoral process isn't as hopeless as it's been made out to be, which retroactively legitimizes Biden's 2020 "win." But I have a strong suspicion that, not only had there been a steal in 2020, but the left will do whatever it can to drag Biden's rotting corpse across the finish line this coming November. By hook or by crook, and undoubtedly by using new methods to perpetrate its shenanigans, Biden (or his possible replacement) will somehow contrive to undead-crawl back into the Oval Office. If I'm wrong (i.e., if Trump wins), I'm prepared to eat crow. I've done it before. But a Trump victory is not necessarily proof of election integrity. The whole process is compromised at this point, and the likelihood of greater and greater violence around Election Day is only increasing.

Back when I was an active elder in my church, we had monthly meetings of the Session (the assembly of active elders, about thirty of us). One bone of contention had to do with a group called Agape, which ministered to people with mental-health issues and had become, as some people put it, "a second congregation"—one that the church was trying to integrate more fully into regular church life. Some Agape members, though, were shy and socially awkward, so they preferred not to associate with the main congregation. A certain amount of pressure was building about this, and Agape was growing large enough to be a real budgetary concern, and most of the nasty fights we would have, in Session, had to do with money. (Of course.) Along with this was the question of whether to replace the current leader of Agape, our assistant pastor Sharon (not her real name). Some pro-Agape people protested that Agape would fall apart without Sharon because she was the driving force behind it, and Agape members were too fragile to handle that sort of radical change. This led me to a sociological insight: a community or group or organization is healthy if it can survive a transfer of leadership. Otherwise, if everything is so focused on one particular leader, what you have is closer to a cult. I privately told our moderator my thoughts, with the logical extension that, if Agape really is so dependent on its current leader, then it's not a "second congregation" at all: congregations survive changes in leadership. The moderator, without naming me, put my argument out there to the Session during one meeting, and one of our most bleeding-heart liberal members went apoplectic and looked as if he were about to attack the moderator for questioning Agape's "congregational" status. I was shocked at my liberal colleague's behavior (which, to my mind, basically proved an even deeper point: wrapping Agape in "congregation" language made it untouchable, undiscussable) and sent him an email afterward saying that the "not a real second congregation" idea was mine, and I explained how I'd reached that conclusion. I never got a reply; he never spoke to me directly about the issue. And life went on.

Sorry about that last part, which has nothing to do with my real point. My real point, in telling the above story, is this: now apply the logic of healthy groups/organizations to America. Are we still capable of peaceful transfers of power, or will we see mobs burning sections of cities, as we've seen in the past, if Trump wins a second term? How healthy is America by this standard? I don't like the answer I'm leaning toward.