The peaceful transfer of power is back, America.

During her concession speech Wednesday afternoon at Howard University, Vice President Kamala Harris raised one of America's most famous traditions from the dead: presidential candidates accepting the results of an election defeat, urging their supporters to do the same and promising to work with the administration.

“Now I know people are feeling and experiencing a range of emotions right now,” Harris said. “I understand, but we have to accept the results of this election. I spoke with President-elect Trump today and congratulated him on his victory. I also told him that we will help him and his team with their transition and engage in a peaceful transfer of power.”

The mention of “President Trump” drew brief boos, which the vice president ignored. But the words “peaceful transfer of power” drew cheers from her dejected supporters. This is very important.

Whatever one thinks about a second Trump presidency, Harris' words are crucial to the health of American democracy. In some ways, 2024 will be the first widely recognized presidential election since George HW Bush decisively defeated Michael Dukakis in 1988.

A vocal and prominent subset of Republicans never accepted the legitimacy of any of Bill Clinton's elections because he never won an absolute majority in the popular vote, largely because third-party candidate Ross Perot received about 18.9% and 8.4% of the popular vote in 1992 and 1996.

Then came 2000, when George W. Bush lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College after the Supreme Court stopped Florida's recount with Bush leading by 537 votes. Many Democrats never accepted Bush's legitimacy afterward, even when he won reelection in 2004, because a small group of Democrats insisted that some vote counter in Ohio had wrongly handed the Buckeye State to Bush.

Barack Obama was elected in a landslide in 2008 and easily re-elected in 2012. But a bogus conspiracy theory that suggested Obama was born abroad — a racist lie that Trump most clearly amplified — led millions of Americans to insist Obama's two decisive victories were actually unconstitutional.

Then there was 2016, when Hillary Clinton lost a seemingly unwinnable election to political newcomer Trump, despite evidence of Russian interference in the election. Many overwrought Democrats refused to accept the glaring failures of their candidate's campaign and instead exaggerated the very real and nefarious ties between Trump and Vladimir Putin into a fantasy of Trump as a puppet of a “Manchurian candidate.”

But in all of these elections the defeated opponent gave in. And with the exception of Al Gore in 2000, they conceded goals quickly. (However, Gore's eventual concession after the Supreme Court decision gracefully accepted the legitimacy of Bush's presidency and called for unity among Americans.)

It was only in 2020, when Trump lost a close – but decisive – election that the 220-year-old tradition of the peaceful transfer of power was broken. And it was broken for no good reason.

Trump spread lies about election fraud that were so baseless that they were rejected by Republican state officials, his own attorney general, his daughter Ivanka and a Supreme Court with a 6-3 conservative majority (including three Trump appointees). . He will now most likely avoid prosecution for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election and incitement of the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 (and for illegally hoarding national security documents).

In Harris' case, the vice president accepted Harris' will after running a campaign that rightly made an issue of the uniquely destructive force that Trump was exerting on American politics – including statements from his own former Cabinet members that he was a crazy fascist be the people. Much like defeated Senator John McCain did in 2008, when he told his supporters that the failure was his, not theirs, and called Obama “my president,” Harris made it clear that Trump will be their president – like this as he will remain so forever 300 million Americans.

The fact that the words “peaceful transfer of power” drew applause from Harris' supporters at Howard says something important about the current state of America. A defeated Trump would never say those words; We know this because he didn't know it when he was defeated. And his supporters would never applaud such a line because Trump would have convinced them of the Big Lie that “they” stole the 2020 election.

Someone had to make a gesture that the rhetorical war that was an election was now over. The loser gave up for the good of the country, even though the winner would never do so.