Referring to this as a "crisis for democracy" isn't a stretch. The GOP already has disproportionate advantages in the electoral college, relative to share of the popular vote, and is trying to undermine the process because they lost *despite* significant institutional advantage. https://twitter.com/LilyMasonPhD/status/1336782225099137031

If one thinks (as basically all political philosophers and theorists do) that democracy only works if you have agreement about and acceptance of the results of the democratic process, then this is a pretty obvious crisis, and one that's worsening.

Personally, I'm pretty strongly committed to this sort of "government by agreement" approach to how social institutions work. (Like I said, it's the default view in contemporary political philosophy.) It makes me *very* nervous that a political party is sabotaging that agreement.

It's not so clear what or how extreme the consequences are. It's also not clear what the tipping point is before the institutions collapse. Some members of a society can disbelieve in the institutions without harming them (e.g. libertarians can exist without currency collapsing).

But the consensus view (both theoretical and empirically supported) is: if "enough" people give up on those beliefs, then they just collapse. The question of where "enough" is makes the growth of this disbelief worrisome.

The other worry is that there's a lot of variation in what happens as these institutions collapse. One serious problem is that the power of the institutions can remain while the democratization of those institutions deteriorates; we saw this in post-USSR collapses.

People (e.g. Nate Silver) saying, "well the courts are rejecting these complaints" are sort of appealing to the idea that we have a bulwark where a certain class of civil servants (judges) have enforceable power to push back on claims advanced by the vocal, disbelieving minority.

But all that bulwark provides is a position that stops the disbelief from impacting some of the institutions (like, say, the elections themselves, the electoral college, and even the presidency). That's good, but it doesn't mean the disbelief is harmless or toothless.

I won't dwell on the technical mechanics of this because (a) this is twitter and (b) I'm not working on the chapter of my diss that deals with this today, but this is probably the biggest development in political and legal philosophy during the 20th century.

Collective intentional states (including collective belief in the existence and authority of the relevant institutions) is pivotal to the functioning of those institutions. It's not the only thing that matters, but it's one of the biggest, most important things.