With the news last week that the final battleground states are certifying the presidential election and the General Services Administration is releasing funds for a transition to a new Biden Administration, it appears that the United States will once again witness a peaceful passing of power from one executive to another. It’s an experience that we take for granted, but we shouldn’t. Deference to the outcomes of free elections by both sides of a bitterly fought contest is not the norm in human history. But ever since John Adams set the precedent, it has been the practice in this country—one more blessing of life in America.
Throughout history, there has been wide variation in the way transitions of power take place. Where kings and emperors have ruled, family dynasties have been common. The problem of handing power to offspring without regard to competence is well-publicized, but even the apparent advantage of this arrangement—a clear line of succession—doesn’t guarantee a seamless transition of power. Where there is no heir or when multiple heirs lay claim to the throne, violence is commonly the result, as the world’s many “wars of succession” demonstrate.
The scramble for power can send an entire nation or even civilization into unrest. The repeated bloodbaths accompanying struggles for supremacy in the Roman Empire became known collectively as the “Crisis of the Third Century.” Closer to our own time, struggles for power within the Politburo in the Soviet Union during the twentieth century resulted in frequent “purges”: exiles, imprisonments, and assassinations. The rise of democracy has alleviated but not eliminated the problem. Many popularly elected African leaders have refused to relinquish power, resorting to constitutional legerdemain, electoral abuses, or outright suppression of safeguards of democracy such as free speech and assembly. The recent history of Venezuela provides a similar case.
The importance of orderly transitions of power is indicated in a small way by the reaction of the stock market to the news that the Trump Administration was taking steps toward a presidential transition. Stocks did not soar on the expectation that a President Biden would be especially friendly to business. Instead, they rose because order and confidence themselves are “good for business,” while chaos and uncertainty are not.
This points to the central reason that the steady passing of governmental control from one regime to another is a blessing: it promotes the common good. The common good is the set of conditions necessary for people to reach fulfillment more easily. Civil peace is one of the principal elements of the common good. Without public order, it is difficult if not impossible to have a stable family life, to pursue learning, to build cultural institutions, to form and maintain businesses, or to enjoy the freedom of religious practice.
As recent events demonstrate, the United States is not immune to the plague of violence and civil unrest. But it does have an exemplary record of free elections followed by peaceful transfers of power. The American system—albeit weakened by mistrust, corruption, and disrespect for the rule of law—endures. Even when we aren’t excited about an incoming administration, we can be grateful that the transition does not provoke widespread rioting, a collapse of governmental functions, or civil war. After the election of 1800, a political battle as ugly as any in American history, the victor sought to remind the nation’s citizens of their common aspirations. The words of Thomas Jefferson’s First Inaugural are as fitting now as they were 220 years ago: “During the contest of opinion through which we have passed, the animation of discussions and of exertions has sometimes worn an aspect which might impose on strangers unused to think freely, and to speak and to write what they think; but this being now decided by the voice of the nation, announced according to the rules of the constitution, all will, of course, arrange themselves under the will of the law, and unite in common efforts for the common good.”
