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The Failure of Reality
Spotify once took a run at Joe Rogan. YouTube banned Dan Bongino. Twitter permanently suspended Marjorie Taylor Greene. Twitter also famously canceled Donald Trump, and me.As with the suspension of Trump (and on a much, much lesser scale, me) progressives cheered the deplatformings the way public lynchings used to attract a picnicking crowd. Progressives control social media (as well as most MSM) and so day-by-day their unreal world becomes ethically more cleansed, more free of things they do not like, and with all the bad news (Hunter Biden) made to go away. The world online is the way they want it to be, with the real world held at bay behind the screen. Like living in The Villages in Florida, or maybe in the Matrix.
It is very much the same for what we’ll call social media 3-D, things like renaming high schools or tearing down statues. Those acts are the equivalent of tweets. Nothing changes because of them, but everyone feels more righteous. Might as well send the 45 cents a day to one of those TV charities and think you are solving hunger in Africa. Or posting on Facebook something saying everyone should get vaccinated, or when gays were still performing well as victims, changing your photo to a rainbow flag.
You see it also in the blurred lines between fiction and reality. A touchpoint for understanding Trump was the dismal novel Handmaiden’s Tale. Black empowerment? Wakanda. Economic equality is fictionalized by replacing every white person in a TV commercial with a black actor, and every other Hallmark romance with a same-sex couple. Same thing when our society over-celebrates the first transgender Jeopardy! winner, or another children’s book where the cuddly caterpillar who does good deeds is nonbinary. NYC’s Shakespeare in the Park this year featured Richard III with the lead played by a black woman, no doubt as some imagine the Bard secretly intended.
But this detachment from reality, the appearance of action instead of action, is why progressives continue to have to “raise awareness” for the same old things over and over. In the end, nothing that happens online matters. Online is just propaganda of unknown real-world effectiveness. The left celebrates the deplatforming as ending Marjorie Taylor Greene, forgetting she is still a sitting Congresswoman. Votes count, “likes” do not. Joe Rogan talks to 11 million people a week; Neil Young, his one-time media nemesis, not so many.
The danger of all this, as each purple haired undergrad eventually bumps into the real world and realizes they/them have been played, is it creates learned helplessness at a time when America indeed faces real problems. But I tweeted about that! I posted “I stand with ____” memes for a week! I liked Dr. Fauci’s Insta! And yet you still got the Covid, huh, bro? It’s why we regularly end up with “cosmetically diverse” institutions, rather than anything real that leads to broad social progress.
How does learned helplessness manifest itself? We might ask why with all the emphasis on change and democracy hanging by a thread, even the most contested elections are lucky to lure half the electorate away from their screens long enough to vote. Behind the smokescreen of claims Republicans are trying to disenfranchise black voters lies the reality that the Democrats have never found a way to get their favored voters off the couch to do the one thing that might still matter. I have voted in every election I was eligible for over the last 55 years. I even voted from inside an actual war, writing off for an absentee ballot. I show my ID (and until recently, vax card) to enter a restaurant; it’s not a big hurdle at the voting booth. If the whole voting thing is not yet clear, think on the difference between the purposeless extremism of pink pussy hat cosplay versus sending three judges to the Supreme Court.
Disreality and learned helplessness are at the heart of progressivism, an oddly self-defeating stance. If one accepts the teachings of the 1619 Project and its armed wing, BLM, blacks have been the passive victims of white racism for over 400 years, a racism which has successfully resisted the Civil War and the end of slavery, Constitutional amendments, the Civil Rights Acts, and Barack Obama. The message is pretty clear: black people can’t win. That’s supposed to inspire something? What would happen with less virtue signaling inside a closed loop and more helping people who actually need help?
Same for the Democratic election strategy of pre-declaring all upcoming elections unfair if the other side wins. Pick your channel: the Repubs will miscount the votes, or America’s proportional representation system means one man’s vote does not count because Wyoming has two senators, or the electoral college negates the make-believe victory standard of popular vote. The end result is why bother to vote when some outside thing means your vote will not count anyway. It seems an odd way to drive a party.
We’re in a world now where being a survivor of something and telling strangers about your trauma is a way of life. I confess a naughty pleasure in reading Huffington Post Personal stories. Most of these are anecdotal tales of victimhood, the conclusion of which is usually that life is unfair and there is not much you can do about it besides make crap on Etsy to “honor” other victims. One recent story was about how moving to Britain for free medical care turned out to be unfair because the writer’s transpartner could not get testosterone shots simply based on his declared identity. Lousy NHS! Another was about how Dry January was unfair to people in forever recovery. Lousy non-drinkers! One about a progressive woman who infiltrates a right-wing mom’s group manages to cover both personal victimhood (she felt unsafe there with her, ‘natch, self-diagnosed special needs child) and the end of democracy. The scale changes but the endpoint remains the same: all victims of unfair systems and the best we can do is whine about it on our segregated social media. It is like getting stuck in a elevator with Greta Thunberg.
I’m not sure how you fix a country being distorted by learned helplessness, with victimhood as a virtue, and which is steadily ever more convinced the real stuff of democracy, voting, doesn’t matter. If that described a football team the game would be over before the other side even showed up. Oh, hey, sorry about the sports reference; I should have cited progressive Olympic heroes, celebrated for quitting as victims of stress instead of for their athletic accomplishments.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
You Opened the Box…
Once you let the genie out of the bottle, you can’t stuff him back in.
Attempts to overturn the results of our election, or to delegitimize a president before he even takes office, are attempts to overturn the system of transfer of power that has served America since its earliest days. There is no measure of exaggeration here; Americans are questioning the results of the election because roughly half don’t like the guy who won.
Somehow things are… special this year. In most elections, a good-sized group of us see our candidate lose, grumble, and move on to some degree. I don’t think Trump will be a good president, but I also do not think he will burn civil rights to the ground, destroy life on the planet, sell Alaska back to Russia, or invade China with Omarosa some drunk weekend.
In what in another era would be left for conspiracy theorists to contemplate, for the first time in our nation’s history powerful mainstream forces are trying to change the results of an election. Shocked by Trump’s victory, and fearing his presidency, they want to stop him from entering the White House. The belief seems to be that he is such a threat that it is necessary to destroy a part of democracy in America to save it.
Some efforts are silly, online petitions demanding, somehow, Clinton become president (here’s one asking the Supreme Court to invalidate the election,) or bleating that her popular vote victory matters somehow within the existing electoral process. Others call for a magic do-over, a new election.
Political scientists claim they maybe have found untested ways for the Electoral College to vote for Clinton, or to postpone a vote.
But after that it gets very serious. America’s foreign intelligence service, the CIA, via anonymous leaks to the New York Times, NBC, and the Washington Post, declared Russia actively and purposefully interceded in our election in favor of Donald Trump. Trump was elected, in part, by the work of Russian cyber blackops.
It is important to unpack what the accusations driving this are: someone working for the Russian government broke into the Democratic National Committee servers and Clinton campaign head John Podesta’s Gmail account, delivered those emails (which the Clinton campaign by and large said were bogus or altered) to places like Wikileaks, and that the emails few voters read influenced the election such that Trump, not Clinton, won the electoral vote. Trump’s strengths as a candidate and Clinton weaknesses were not significant enough on their own to have swayed the electoral count 74 votes in Trump’s favor. At the same time, for these accusations to matter, President Trump will act in favor of Russian interests (choosing hard liner John Bolton as number two at the State Department already seems counter to that) and against those of the United States.
The accusations against Trump can rise to the level of treason (some are speculating Trump was a willing participant in any Russian ops), a capital crime, the most serious crime an American can commit against his country.
All is supposed to be revealed in the form of some sort of investigation.
Leaving how clever use of redactions can present “evidence” in misleading ways, intelligence assessments are rarely black and white, especially when seeking to explain why an action took place, its ultimate political goal. An intelligence service can conclude with reasonable confidence (for example) that Country X executed 12 dissidents last week. It is much harder to say why, or why now, or why those 12, or why not a different group, or what those executions mean in the longer game of local politics. So while technical means may be able to point to a hacker with connections to Russia (though hackers include in their tradecraft leaving false clues), moving from whether any hacks were standard information gathering as engaged in by all sides, or an active part of a campaign to change the course of our election, is a tough job. So those who expect a black and white report on what they Russians did, why they did it, and how it affected the election, are very unlikely to get it.
So what will be done?
The current focus is on the Electoral College voting on Monday, December 19 to put Hillary Clinton into the White House. That would require breaking with some 224 years of practice, moving against the will of about half of American voters who acted in good faith under the current system believing their vote would be assessed by the rules and practices in place, and destroying the orderly transfer of power that marks a democracy.
But if Trump prevails in the Electoral College, what next? There is no Constitutional allowance for a “second election.” Bomb Moscow? Keep Barack Obama in power? Dispatch a lynch mob to Trump Tower?
Well, of course not. Probably.
Instead we will enter a new administration with a delegitimized president, under the shadow of multiple conspiracy theories, accusations, hearings, investigations and likely threats to of impeachment proceedings. Every decision President Trump makes, as with his every Cabinet choice now, will be weighed against the accusations. America’s Russia policy (in Europe, the Middle East, Asia) will be held hostage to rumors and leaks. A divided America will become more divided.
The Bush-Gore election of 2000 was contested right into the Supreme Court. The differences, however, are significant. The post-election fight took place between two men still candidates, to decide a winner. Trump is the President Elect, and the process, whatever it is, seeks to overturn, not decide, that result. In Bush-Gore, once the Court declared a winner, the results were accepted, albeit reluctantly by some, and America moved on. Lastly, the struggle between Bush and Gore took place in open court, not via leaks and classified documents.
There is also the argument, basically a variation of “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear” that Americans should be willing to submit to post-election recounts and investigations, themselves often inconclusive or subject to another round of questions, to “prove” nothing went amiss. There is danger in confusing a potential body blow to the electoral process, seeking to overturn a completed election, with casting it all as benign verification.
An additional danger is in the McCarthy-esque conflating of opposition to these efforts with a lack of patriotism, and by invalid extension, support for America’s enemies. To remain skeptical is to stand against the United States. To question the CIA is to disrespect our intelligence professionals. Journalists who do not support the accusations are said to be either active Russian agents of influence or “useful idiots” too dumb to know they are being manipulated.
The real impact of all this will be felt long past Trump’s tenure.
Democrats, Republicans, and players such as the CIA will have four years to consider how this process of delegitimizing a President Elect could work more effectively next time. The people who support extra-Constitutional steps now because of Donald Trump will find those same step will be available in later elections, to use against a candidate they favor. Voting can potentially become only a preliminary gesture, with real struggle only starting after the election itself.
Many are deeply upset Hillary Clinton lost. Many are unsure, even fearful, of a Trump presidency. But once you let the genie of trying to overturn an election loose, you won’t be able to stop it next time.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
The Electoral College: A Civics Lesson
We have and have had for 224 years an Electoral College system. The popular vote is not and has never been how we elect a president.
This is the 6th time in U.S. history the candidate chosen has lost the popular vote, nothing new. The country has muddled on, with some of those presidents being better than others.
In addition, because of the electoral college system, candidates campaign for electoral votes, not the popular vote. That is the basis for their strategizing how to allot their limited time and resources.
So, for example, knowing he had little chance to win Democratic strongholds California and New York, Trump did not campaign extensively there even though they are big states. That’s how Clinton won the popular vote, because her campaign aimed at those (big) states where she thought she would win the electoral vote. The size of the popular vote garnered is more a reflection of the way the system works than it is a gauge of popularity.
You just got woke to the electoral college system after napping through high school civics class? Good for you. You don’t like it? Also cool. Now read up on how the Constitution gets changed. It is a long, slow process, and intended to be that way just to avoid knee jerk reaction such as are underway today. So best to contact your legislators today and get them started doing something abut the Electoral College no one has otherwise done in over two centuries.
There is no system or method for overturning an election, and people are very wrong to talk about trying to do so based on claimed Russian meddling. For that to have validity someone would have to show conclusively and without doubt (we’re talking about dismantling a 224 year old system here, folks, not simple WMDs):
The hack took place –> The Russian government did it –> The Clinton campaign lied when they said the hacked emails were frauds and/or altered –> The hack itself was more important than the contents of the emails –> That any of this, if true, truly changed the results of the election in favor of Trump.
That’s a pretty big bite. If you can’t prove that, you have no case to even think about negating the system, throw away the votes of some 62 million people, and plunging the nation into chaos that it may or may not ever recover from.
And while there may be untried methods to make it possible for the Electoral College to vote for Clinton, can vote isn’t the same as should vote. An awful lot of people voted themselves in anticipation that their votes would be reflected by their electors. That was the system they entered the game under, not something along the lines of “let’s see how this voting thing plays out on November 8 and if don’t like it let’s try something else.” You think disenfranchising all those voters is just gonna happen without any problems?
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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