The history of allegations of vote rigging goes back to the 19th century; there were loud, public allegations regarding at least Kennedy, Clinton, Bush, and Obama before Trump. What was notable, of course, about Trump's rigging claims is that they were accompanied by an actual effort to overturn the election, something that has no precedent. That wasn't the "elites"; that was an outsider effort.
Election denialism clearly isn't a reaction to a rejection of institutional norms by elites, unless we're talking about elites during the time of Tilden.
I might agree with you about the filibuster, the Tea Party (bad, but not batshit), and the refusal to confirm Garland. But that doesn't help your argument, which is I think fatally broken.
When Terry McAuliffe became chairman of the DNC, he said that "Katherine Harris, Jeb Bush, Jim Baker, and the Supreme Court ... tampered with the results" of the 2000 election. At the 2004 DNC Convention, he said that Republicans "stole" the 2000 election: https://twitter.com/TeamYoungkin/status/1442488094301822980.
Comparably prominent figures on the Republican side were not saying similar things about Clinton or Obama. Unlike Hilary Clinton said about Trump, McCain and Romney never said Obama was an "illegitimate" President.
> What was notable, of course, about Trump's rigging claims is that they were accompanied by an actual effort to overturn the election, something that has no precedent. That wasn't the "elites"; that was an outsider effort.
Sure. Trump is worse than anything Democrats did from 2000-2018. Certainly individually, possibly in the aggregate.
> Election denialism clearly isn't a reaction to a rejection of institutional norms by elites, unless we're talking about elites during the time of Tilden.
Trump's ability to deny the legitimacy of the election and maintain the support of the same voters who nominated Mittens is absolutely a reaction to elites rejecting institutional norms. For two decades, CNN sanctioned Democrats' election lies instead of condemning them.
Then came 2016, when Democrat-voting federal employees declared war on Trump--the duly elected President--through the "Resistance." If you wanted to convince the American public that the "deep state" exists and that the rules have already been thrown out the window--to make it trivial to draw comparisons between DC and the Capitol from "The Hunger Games"--you could not have picked a better way to do it.
Again: that case is that there is nothing new about claims that elections were stolen, but that there is clearly something new about a President literally attempting (in more than one way) to rig an election after losing.
As it happens, I agree with you (or at least, the professors who taught you this at Northwestern) about the 2000 election --- that is, that it was correctly decided. But not only did Terry McAuliffe believe 2000 was wrongly decided, so did almost half the Supreme Court. And despite all that, there was a peaceful transfer of power, and not a whisper from the Democratic party that any of the institutions of government be bent or subverted to "correct" the result.
You haven't provided any evidence to connect obstinate federal employees to Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election, and so I don't think I need to address that point. I don't agree with you about those obstinate employees (obstinate employees brought Nixon down, after all), but that doesn't matter.
The idea that the Democrats are somehow responsible for Trump's effort to literally rig the 2020 election is a strange hill to die on. I don't think many reasonable people would be sympathetic to the argument.
The references to “they” throughout the speech is usually to Romney and Walker, sometimes to Republicans generally: “Ladies and gentlemen, Governor Romney and Congressman Ryan are running on a theme that they announced at their announcement -- and I'm not being cynical about this -- this when I say they say, quote, we're running to restore the dreams and the greatness of this country. What they didn't tell you in that announcement.”
The immediately preceding text is: “Look at what they value and look at their budget and what they're proposing. Romney wants to let the -- he said in the first hundred days he's going to let the big banks once again write their own rules -- (audience murmurs) -- unchain Wall Street.”
When exactly was that? Republicans ran "Mittens" Romney in 2012 (and John McCain in 2008). Two men whose adherence to institutional norms is irreproachable. Yet, as Vice President, Joe Biden said that Romney would put Black people “back in chains.” That was after prominent Democrats spent years claiming Bush “stole” the 2000 and 2004 elections. https://freebeacon.com/elections/terry-mcauliffe-championed-...
Then Trump won in a fair election in 2016, and Republicans won the House by a million and a half votes. Democrats went completely ape-shit at the emergence of Trump, and the media, unelected bureaucrats, etc., all shredded institutional norms in response to him. Clinton claimed he was an “illegitimate President.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trum.... The rhetoric convinced half of Democrats that Putin had “tampered with vote tallies” to get Trump elected: https://twitter.com/sahilkapur/status/815256370958237696?s=2...
All the crazy stuff from conservatives--the election denialism, etc.--came in response to that.
> Further, Trump being elected happened nearly a decade after the emergence of the Tea Party, a batshit insane movement.
There's nothing "batshit insane" about the Tea Party. They're just the ideological wing of the party, just like the AOC/Sanders wing of the Democratic Party. The Tea Party did nothing outside of established procedures.
> Abandonment of institutional values? Like refusing to even try negotiating legislation with any resemblance of good faith to do good by the citizens of the country?
The parties obviously disagree about what's "good" for the country. “Not doing what Democrats want” isn’t a breach of political norms.
In the U.S., the primary lawmaking body is the House. Democrats lost that in 2010 by almost 6 million votes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_House_of_Re.... Republicans have no obligation to move forward on Obama's legislative priorities when they control the House, just as Democrats had no obligation to move forward on Trump's legislative priorities when they won control of the House in 2018.
> Like the explosion of the use of the filibuster in 2009?
The explosion in the filibuster was done by Democrats at the end of Bush's last two years: https://www.senate.gov/legislative/cloture/clotureCounts.htm. It was double in 07-08 compared to 05-06. It was no higher in Obama's first two years than in Bush's last two years. The filibuster is a red herring in the last six years of Obama's term, because Democrats didn't control the House and couldn’t win a majority for their legislative agenda anyway.
Remember, the filibuster is a legislative rule that can be overturned by a simple majority vote of the Senate, which Democrats had from 2007 to 2014. They could have dropped the filibuster at any point during that 7-year span. They didn’t do it because it’s critical to their strategy.
> Like refusing to bring a Supreme Court justice nomination to a vote on the floor of the Senate?
This is the only thing that comes close to qualifying as a norm violation.