And one more thought this morning. It’s not surprising that mainline Democratic institutions (and I include the Obama admin here) are silent on a serious challenge to the election, or even quietly oppose it. For them, the threat of a constitutional crisis is much more serious than the threat of a demagogue. If the legitimacy of the presidency were to be thrown into serious doubt — for example, if it wasn’t clear who should be inaugurated as president — the US would cross a serious and irreversible threshold. People like to babble about the “nuclear codes,” but you can rest assured that over the last several decades the Pentagon has gamed out all kinds of scenarios in which civilian control was nonexistent, contested, and/or unreliable. The question isn’t whether the Pentagon can implement ‘exceptional’ measures, it’s which ones. The threat isn’t the Pentagon, it’s every other federal agency: their operations would be jeopardized by paralysis and conflict, but they couldn’t rely on secrecy to hide the political turmoil. That’s one big reason why there was so much emphasis toward the end of the election on the ‘smooth transition of presidential power’: it’s not a soap opera involving two people, it’s more like warring factions. Some agencies would be fine, more or less, but others (like the FBI) would face demands to be politicized much more serious than what we saw in Comey’s interventions. An effective challenge to the election that ran past the inauguration (which is a mostly symbolic event, hence its power) would reveal, paradoxically, how vulnerable the US federal government is as a political structure and how resilient it is as a bureaucracy. The US could survive that, but it would be a different country — and one step closer to where the USSR was in the late ’80s. So, again, no surprise that Clinton is tacitly accepting the reported results of the election.