The unthinkable became thinkable midmorning of September 11, 2001.
Ideas change.
It was a typical Tuesday morning. I was awake at 5:00 a.m. Pacific Time, at my computer, with CNBC in background on the TV. There was an accident at the World Trade Center.
Then the second plane hit. Our understanding of our world flipped. One plane is an accident, two is a plan. And then the Pentagon and the plane crash in Pennsylvania. This was a coordinated attack.
Over the next few days some of our presumptions ended, with giant consequences for Americans. We learned that planes themselves could be weapons, that plane hijackers needed to be resisted, that the top floors of landmark buildings were targets. We learned to be suspicious. Most of all we realized that we were vulnerable.
We have had another realization. The idea that any president would conspire to remain in office after having lost the election used to be a crazy idea. It was unthinkable -- almost. Bill Maher had burnished his reputation as cranky critic by saying in his comedy show that Trump would overturn the election if he lost. "I don't see him leaving willingly." "I don't see him leaving under any conditions."
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In the fall prior to the 2020 election a serious article in The Atlantic Monthly warned Trump might refuse to leave. This wasn't comedy.
It’s democracy’s most dangerous instant: the interval when power changes hands, testing whether the nation stays moored to self-governance.
But the article had a kind of campfire ghost-story element to it. It was scary, but make-believe. The article quoted Lindsay Graham:
“I’m not buying into that nutty stuff. I’m not worried about that.”Graham called it "nutty stuff," meaning that Trump's plan ran into a wall of idea-inertia in the weeks after the election. It was all so new. Vice President Pence looked for guidance from another former Republican VP, who said it was unthinkable. A Republican Attorney General in bright red Idaho said no: “The legally correct decision may not be the politically convenient decision." But Trump saw the Texas lawsuit, which attempted to stop the vote count in Wisconsin, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin, as the way to overturn the election. The Texas lawsuit alleged fraud, and if their elections were questionable they could be discarded by a decision-maker. Court observers called it a "Hail Mary." The U.S. Supreme Court turned down Texas, but not on substantive grounds. It said Texas lacked standing.
Trump's unwavering claims of victory, his support for the January 6 riot, and his condemnation of Pence combined to change mainstream opinion among habitual Republican voters. GOP officeholders and thought leaders accept the ends, if not Trump's means, although some support those, too. And Trump returning as president, whatever his sins against democracy, is thought better than return of a Biden-Harris presidency. Overturning an election is wrong, and it would certainly be wrong were Kamala Harris to attempt it, but it is a forgivable misdemeanor for a Republican. Going forward it needs to be done under pretext of legality.
The idea and the mechanism is in place. The GOP electorate is prepped to believe that any election is questionable. Vote tabulating companies won lawsuits, but not the hearts and minds of Republican voters. County and state election certifiers are in place ready to dig in their heels and find reasons to object, which will throw off state counts, pushing states against hard deadlines, justifying state legislatures stepping in. It is now mainstream to say that certifications by courts are illegitimate, filled as they are with Democratic judges, RINOs, and cowards.
Accept a loss? Never. Conceding an election loss is shameful, not patriotic. The unthinkable is now thinkable
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11 comments:
The great American experiment goes on. After 9/11, we experimented with imposing democracy at gunpoint on countries that had no concept of it. It didn’t work out so well.
Meanwhile, we’re still experimenting with how to maintain our democracy at home. The problem is that it requires an informed citizenry – something seriously lacking in the Disinformation Age. Let’s hope we do better here than we did in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“[Hitler's] primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.“. 1943 psychological profile of Hitler by Walter Langer.
My life sucks. But at least, if I can get goofy T-shirt, team jersey, or a hat, then I have some thing to root for, some I hope for the future…?
"Meanwhile, we’re still experimenting with how to maintain our democracy at home. The problem is that it requires an informed citizenry – something seriously lacking in the Disinformation Age."
Let's start with our K-12 schools where too many adults think we should waste time on top many social things rather than reading, writing, and arithmetic. Those three subjects also involve history, critical thinking., and personal finance.
Our leaders need to reprioritize those basics.
Instead, were wasting students' timewith gender identity, politicking, and other social justice efforts. Those can come later AFTER proficiency is demonstrated with the other topics.
M2inFLA makes a good point: Responsible citizenship needs to begin in grade school, starting with the basics. Since children are using digital devices at such an early age, one of the basics needs to be how to identify reliable sources of information, or how to tell fact from fiction. Too many people are too easily duped by idiotic “alternative facts,” such as the election fraud lies, climate change denial, anti-vax hysteria and the whitewashing of Black history.
Of course, such a rational approach would result in a lot of propaganda being seen for the bullshit it is, so Republicans would undoubtedly consider it too “woke,” especially in Florida.
One major problem is that Democrats have been changing voting methods to make voting easier. In the process, they have made voter registration, ballot collection, and vote counting much more complicated.
As anything gets more complex, it necessarily becomes more vulnerable to hacking. Whether or not our electoral mechanisms have actually been hacked does not alter the fact that those mechanisms look more like they could be hacked.
Democrats like to say that there has been no evidence of successful vote hacking. While this may be true, it’s an argument made by the same people who created the new vulnerabilities, so it tends not to be extremely convincing to the other side.
“We left the door unlocked and all the windows open, but there is no evidence that anything was stolen.”
A statement like that requires more trust than currently exists between the two sides of our political polarization.
For the record: It isn't just Democrats saying there's no evidence of massive voter fraud, but election officials of both parties and the courts. About 60 challenges to the 2020 election by the Trump campaign and his allies were thrown out of court for lack of evidence. But that isn't good enough for Republicans – the lack of evidence is all the evidence they need. In other words, they’re nuts.
The appearance of impropriety can sap trust in the electoral process. Unsupervised ballot drop boxes aren’t a good look, regardless of whether the vulnerability was successfully exploited.
Apparently a number of people share the view that unsupervised ballot drop boxes aren't a good look, because armed militia started strutting around some of them in 2020 and 2022. Not only is that a better look, but they can discourage people from voting if they seem questionable - Hispanics and the like.
I will never forget a former State Representative at a town hall, saying with utter heartfelt conviction;
"The absence of evidence is proof that the fraud is occurring". Later in yhe same meeting he tried to convince his audience yhat yhe reason for the 2nd Amendment was to prevent a Government takeover.
“… unsupervised drop boxes … armed militia …”
This rhetorical tactic is called “whataboutism”. It’s an attempt to distract from a topic that’s inconvenient to the writer’s ideology by bringing one up that’s more convenient. “Don’t think about what he just said; think about what I just said.”
Both unsupervised drop boxes and intimidation by armed militias are bad.
The point was that armed militias were supervising the ballot boxes. How is that better than simply letting people drop off their ballots?
Here's an example of an incident in Lane County:
https://nbc16.com/news/local/state-police-superintendent-there-was-an-incident-down-in-springfield-at-ballot-box
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