But here, we are no longer talking about democracy or law. The problem of how to manage Trump’s supporters is like the problem of how to prevent China from invading Taiwan, or to keep Hamas from again committing mass murder and rape. Where the rule of law is insecure, the question of how to handle violent, unscrupulous bullies is a prudential one. Of course, the most dangerous of those bullies is Trump himself. There is no rule book in such matters. Anyone who has no doubts about how to handle them misunderstands the chaotic contingency of human affairs.
At the level of principle, however, the question of whether democracy should be checked by the Fourteenth Amendment’s disqualification clause is just like the question of whether, because of the Electoral College, the American people should be ruled by a president that most of them voted against. In each case, the rule of law depends on accepting the imperfect system of law we have inherited. The disqualification clause is less well known, but that’s only because since the Civil War there hasn’t been a presidential candidate who deployed mob violence to try to steal an election.
But there’s another distinction worth noting: The Electoral College provisions of the Constitution have become a pointless dead weight, their nasty proslavery purposes forgotten and irrelevant. By contrast, the disqualification clause is highly relevant—even prescient—and it would be serving the very purpose for which it was enacted: to bar those who have attempted to destroy America’s government, thereby betraying their oaths of office, from ever again participating in that government.