Dear liberals, have more faith in your legacy. Donald Trump is not the apocalypse.

The challenge that President Trump poses to critics is to maintain a sense of balance and dignity amidst the turbulence his unpredictability and impulsiveness creates. His compulsive lying breeds hyperbole in return from critics. His paranoia begets paranoia. His drama causes his critics to hyperventilate. It is hard to retain a sense of proportion and lucidity amidst his lack of them. But failure to approach the current situation with sobriety in the face of his constant provocations is necessary in order to distinguish genuine political challenges from fake ones.

For example, in reaction to Trump’s claims that elections are rigged, the left has developed its own version of this charge, citing restrictive voter identification laws that target poor and minority voters, and partisan gerrymandering that maximizes the efficiency of Republican votes.

In fact, on balance, across the 50 states, voting rights laws have been changing in the direction of expanding, not restricting, the right to vote. Since the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder Supreme Court ruling that permitted states to pass restrictive voter identification laws, some states have made access to the ballot more difficult. Yet more laws have been enacted that make it easier, not harder, to vote. 

Such laws include restoring voting rights to citizens who have been convicted of felonies, permitting mail ballots, allowing early voting, moving the last filing date for registration closer to election day, and automatic voter registration in which state offices automatically register citizens to vote unless they opt out. 

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Nor is it clear that voter ID laws are effective at suppressing turnout among their intended targets, traditional Democratic constituencies such as minorities and the poor.  For example, Alabama, the home of Shelby County, was one of the first states to use new voter ID laws in elections once the Court issued its historic ruling.

But in Alabama’s recent special Senate election, Democrat Doug Jones owed his victory over Republican Roy Moore in large part to high turnout among black voters. Voter identification laws so incense targeted communities that they galvanize to mitigate the law’s effects. Such laws are noxious and should be opposed in principle regardless of their effectiveness. But there is little to fear that, aside from very tight races, voter identification laws alter election results. 

Liberals also attribute rigged elections to partisan and racial gerrymandering in which Republican legislatures draw district lines in a way that “wastes” Democratic votes. But the greater efficiency with which Republicans are able to translate votes into seats is due as much to political geography as it is to the diabolical creativity they have shown in electoral mapping.  

Democrats are residentially concentrated in dense urban areas. Republicans, on the other hand, enjoy a natural advantage in districting because their voters are more dispersed in the suburban and rural periphery.  

Republican majorities in these outlying areas are not as packed together or as large as the Democratic majorities in the cities. So Democrats have the dubious privilege of wasting more votes by losing respectably in moderately Republican districts, compared with Republicans who lose badly in overwhelmingly Democratic districts.  

Even letting neutral commissions draw district lines would only reduce but not eliminate “the efficiency gap” between Democrats and Republicans in their ability to translate votes into seats. Republicans would still enjoy a natural advantage because of where their voters live.

What's more, partisan gerrymandering is less powerful than its image. The Senate with its unchanging state boundaries has experienced the same partisan shifts as the House. Whether it arises from unintentional residential patterns or intentional skullduggery, gerrymandering may exaggerate partisan shifts — but it doesn't create them.

Liberals also complain that Trump has legitimized prejudice and given license for people to express it. So far it is hard to find empirical support for this charge in hate crimes reporting. The last year of reporting, which covers Trump’s fiery, odious rhetoric through the 2016 primary and general election campaigns, shows hate crimes increased by 4.6%.

Despite this rise, we are still in a much better place than we were at the turn of the millennium. Hate crimes are lower nationally (down 24%) — as are those regarding race (down 20%), religion (down 14%), and sexual orientation (down 17%) — since 2000. The decline in hate crimes since 2000 was arrested in 2013 before Trump became a national political figure and is now, perhaps, being reversed. 

The mild Trump Bump during the 2016 campaign is nowhere near the surge in hate crimes that occurred after 9/11, and it may be that larger social trends are responsible for it and not Trump. Canada, that nice, friendly, tolerant country across the border that in 2015 elected Justin Trudeau, the anti-Trump, saw almost the same percent increase in hate crimes in 2016 as the U.S. 

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Trump has degraded our politics, dismissed democratic norms, violated standards of civility, and made an already rancorous atmosphere even more toxic. All of this matters. But on the substance of domestic policy, he doesn’t deviate much from the standard Republican playbook: rolling back environmental regulations, cutting taxes on the rich and corporations, appointing conservative judges, toughening immigration laws and enforcement, and reducing consumer protections.   

Fortunately, some of these policies have been blunted by Trump administrative chaos and incompetence, judicial delay and reversal, bureaucratic guile and obstruction, and public protests and Democratic opposition. The post-election honeymoon period when the most damage could have been done is long over, the Republic survived, and we are entering the midterm elections when Democrats can expect to make large gains.   

So why all the agita; all the “Chicken Little” panic that the sky is falling? 

Liberals suffer from historical amnesia. They quickly forget how bad things were in the past and narcissistically presume the challenges they face today with Trump are uniquely fearsome. Also, they are as prone to groupthink as conservatives. They live in their own echo chamber, which reinforces and agitates their justifiable scorn for Trump.  

The liberal view Trump as an existential threat to their identity rooted in cosmopolitan values, and are as susceptible to the disorienting passions of identity politics as anyone else. His attacks on pluralism, diversity and tolerance lead them to exaggerate the political stakes at hand.

The loss of perspective among liberal critics of Trump is troubling. They dismiss the power of their own legacy of increasing voting rights and tolerance at the same time they exaggerate the malignant effects of Trump. They are addicted to analyses that confirm their fears instead of their hopes, and have let the threat Trump poses to their identity cloud their judgment.      

The apocalypse has not arrived.

At least, not yet.  

Alan Draper is the Michael W. Ranger and Virginia R. Ranger Professor of Government at St. Lawrence University.