Regardless of Who Becomes President

This is going to be a messy election.  Regardless of who becomes president, it is likely that the results of the election will further polarize out country to a degree our democracy may not ultimately survive.  Can we prepare for the political, social and cultural storm that is probably coming?  No matter which candidate is elected, large swaths of the country will feel at best cheated, at worst defrauded.

If Trump Wins   

If Trump repeats his 2016 success with

• narrow victories in the “swing states,”
• a small margin in the Electoral College, and
• a minority of the popular vote,

then many of us on the left are going to believe that the election does not represent the will of the American people.

We will have good reasons, which I’ve reviewed before: here, here, here, and here.  A brief review:

-- Voter suppression by disqualifying voters: A number of states have passed laws discouraging or even preventing particular groups from voting.

• Voter ID laws: Despite the lack of any evidence that voter fraud is an issue in American elections, many states have begun to require some form of official picture identification (drivers’ license, passport, etc) to vote.  The ostensible purpose is to prevent (nonexistent) individual voter fraud, but the actual impact is to discourage poor and minority populations (who tend to be Democratic) from voting.
• Felony disenfranchisement: A majority of states do not allow felons to vote until after their entire sentence (including parole) has been completed (and ten states even longer or permanently).  This disenfranchises approximate 2.5% of American voters, the majority of whom, again, would tend to vote Democratic.
• Purging of voter rolls: States can purge from the list of registered voters those who haven’t voted recently, often without notifying them or giving them a chance to object.  This punishes voters who move frequently (ie renters and the young) or those ignorant of the provision, again, groups that tend to vote Democratic.  Voter Picture ID laws favor Republicans exclusively.

-- Voter suppression through making voting more difficult: 

• Certain states have eliminated polling centers, especially in poor and minority areas, forcing voters to travel long distances and/or to wait in long lines to vote.
• Most states have no same-day registration, requiring voters to register prior to voting day, disenfranchising those who move frequently or who don’t know the regulation.
• A current issue is the effort to restrict mail-in voting.  Absentee ballots, mail-in ballots, and early voting increase voter participation.  Despite the President’s protestations, there is no evidence of significant voter fraud with write-in balloting.
• A number of states prohibit or curb civic groups from helping people vote, for instance, by delivering absentee ballots to polling places.

-- The Electoral College favors small states, which are overwhelmingly Republican, and allows candidates with a minority of popular vote to win.  Both George W Bush in the 2000 election and Donald Trump in the 2016 election became president despite receiving a minority of the popular vote.

If Trump wins, progressive and left-leaning independents will have many reasons for believing that democracy has been subverted.  Even if there is no voter fraud in the legal sense, we are also far from one-person-one-vote.

If Biden Wins

Progressives, on the other hand, must remember that if Biden wins, Trump voters will also have strongly-held, sincere reasons to believe that their voices have been suppressed.

• Primary among these is President Trump’s ongoing false claims that the 2016 presidential election was rigged and his repeated assertions (without evidence) that this year’s November election will be “the greatest Rigged Election in history.”
• As do Biden’s, Trump supporters have good reason to believe that their candidate should win.  Given the powerfully partisan nature of our country, we tend live in separate geographic areas, have different friends, read different news sources, and so on.  Knowing few people from the “other side ,” it’s easy to believe that our candidate has a majority.
• Mainstream media have been painted as purveyors of “fake news” and are, therefore, not trusted by Trump supporters.  The news and opinion sources they do watch, eg Fox News or Sinclair Broadcasting (that owns 40% of local broadcast stations), tend to interpret the news through their own political lenses, again leading to viewers’ expectations of a Trump victory.
• Even the multitude of voter polls can have widely varying results depending on how the questions are asked and tabulated.

The class differences between pro-Trump and anti-Trump supporters are not so strict as they are sometimes described, but there are certainly prejudices about the “elite,” on one side, and the “blue collar workers,” on the other.  Each side believes that the other side cannot really understand them, so the political game seems to be really zero-sum.  If I win, you lose; and vice-versa.  We find it hard to remember that we really do share common cause.

The expectations of Trump supporters can be exaggerated. But, given the fervor of the Trump campaign and his preparation to claim electoral fraud, there will be every reason for supporters to contest a Trump loss. 

Regardless of Who Wins

One issue that is only beginning to receive attention is that, given the pandemic, the number of write-in ballots is likely to swamp some election offices, creating a significant delay in reporting (as opposed to the same-night results we are used to).  In close elections, mail-in ballots, many arriving days after election day, may well change the early results, leading to easy charges of vote tampering with unpredictable results, even violence.

Two highly dangerous conditions might arise:

• In a close election, Trump has already indicated, he may contest the results, leading to a possible constitutional crisis.  Given our partisan divide, that could be disastrous for the democracy.

• Even without such a disastrous outcome, the great likelihood is that our partisanship will accelerate to disastrous levels, making democracy increasingly unstable.

I would suggest that such an increase in our antipathy and mistrust will threaten our democracy almost as much as the President’s re-election.

The question remains: How do we prepare?  What can we do about it? 

I have thought a lot about this in the past year, and I am not close to an answer.  Some people have written about interesting and hopeful long-term responses, but we are only a little over four months away from the election.  The question of how any of us (regardless of partisan view) should respond, requires a lot more time and energy than we have been giving it.

Armed Vigilantes “Protect” Peaceful Demonstrators

In mostly white small towns and rural areas across the country, in places that have never seen marches or demonstrations, small groups gather to protest of the police murder of George Floyd and to support the work of Black Lives Matter.  It is a source of hope for a better American future.

But there’s another, much darker presence on those streets, too.  Armed militia — assault weapons in their hands — line the protest routes and stand on rooftops like snipers.  They are “protecting their communities,” they say, as if the 400 demonstrators marching in Omak, Washington, a city of fewer than 5,000 people, were going to pillage, burn and loot the place.

Reports the Washington Post: 

“Honestly, it was terrifying,” said [the organizer of the march]. “They claimed they were there to protect the city from outsiders, but it felt more like preparation to kill.”

Social media before the march included a post characterizing the upcoming gathering as “free target practice.”

In Bethel, Ohio, a town of 2,800, over 700 counter-protestors — some carrying rifles while others brought only bats and clubs — confronted a group of about 80 peaceful demonstrators, one of whom was attacked.

Said Emma Ronai-Durning of the Rural Organizing Project, a nonprofit organization based in Cottage Grove, Oregon:

Of the more than 60 actions that have unfolded in rural Oregon, virtually all of them have encountered backlash from armed groups, whether in the form of intimidation on social media or actual boots on the ground.

Really?!  Armed vigilantes intimidating peaceful protestors: We haven’t seen such wide-spread armed, political intimidation since the 1950s and -60s Civil Rights in the South.  The threat behind the intimidation is real: one protester was shot and critically wounded by armed civilians in Albuquerque. 

When asked what the authorities should do, a police spokesperson said: “There’s a right to peacefully assemble, and there’s a right to bear arms.  If I trample on one of those rights, then I trample on all of them.” 

I don’t think this is what the framers of the Second Amendment had in mind.

We must not normalize these appalling assaults on our freedom of speech.  Democracy is lost one small step at a time.  Let’s at least notice the losses and ring the alarm.**

________________
** The avenues for (unspectacular) action are many:

•       try to gently open lines of communication with friends and acquaintances not to convince them but only to inform them 
•       join the crowds in the streets
•       hold a seminar in your church
•       support Black Lives Matter financially and with your feet
•       contribute money and time to congressional candidates in close races even if they aren’t your favorites
•       join the Brady Campaign against gun violence
•       join Eric Holder’s attempt to dismantle gerrymandering
•       write letters-to-the-editor and opinion pieces for your local paper

Preparation for Autocracy

Just after the November 2016 presidential election, CBS veteran reporter Leslie Stahl interviewed President-elect Donald Trump.  In the interview, as he had consistently during his campaign, Trump began to attack the press.  Stahl asked him why he kept up his attacks even though he’d won the election.  Trump said he meant to discredit the press and demean the reporters so that “when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.”  Few seemed to recognize the dark truth of his statement.

Since his election, the President has worked assiduously to discredit reliable sources of truth and accountability — not only the press but also sources within his own close circle, his own watchdogs, official government reports, other politicians, science and so on — and to promote himself as the only credible interpreter of reality.  Observers have usually interpreted his efforts as attempts to protect himself from public criticism and to present himself in the best light.  This is accurate, but it misses the far more important, long-term impact on our democracy: Trump is teaching us to accept the lies of the leader. 

To survive, autocrats must blanket their actions and harmful impact with lies.  Their supporters must be willing to accept the word of the autocrat, even against all evidence.  In this light, many of Trump’s even minor misrepresentations turn more menacing, part of a web of deception.

• In the past months, President Trump has fired five Inspectors General (IGs), government officials who have the authority to investigate wrong-doing in the government, including the presidency.  Although these IGs have been doing their jobs appropriately, the President has made no secret of the fact that these firings have been in retaliation for their truth-telling.  President Trump has not given any explanation for firing them except: 

 It is vital that I have the fullest confidence in the appointees serving as Inspectors General … That is no longer the case with regard to [these Inspectors General].

In other words, when the President no longer believes that an IG is serving his best interest, he fires them, which not only removes another source of truth but also chills other IGs’ willingness to exercise their authority to root out governmental malfeasance and corruption.

• Since its beginning, the President’s descriptions of the coronavirus pandemic and his role in responding to it have swung widely.  For the first two months, he insisted — against all evidence — that there was no problem: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China,” he said in January.  Two months later, he said, “No, I’m not concerned at all [about the virus]. No, I’m not. No, we’ve done a great job.”  Two weeks later, he revised history: “This is a pandemic … I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”  

Like the firings of the IGs, this is the behavior we have come to expect from this President. The mere quantities of his lies have prevented adequate response.  These lies, however, have then been frequently accepted as truth by Fox news commentators, other press supportive of Trump, and that 40% of the voting population who are his followers.  In other words, Trump distorts political reality so that (given his dismissal of mainstream news sources) a large portion of the population has, effectively, no access to accurate news, only his version.

• In what might seem an unrelated issue, Trump announced he was taking the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine and began indirectly promoting it as prevention of COVID-19.  His own medical experts disagreed with his recommendation, but Trump doubled down, essentially denying the objective evidence and presenting himself — rather than the scientists — as the source of medical truth.  While this might be seen as just another expression of the President’s ignorance or grandiosity, it is also another example of his denial of fact-based reality and setting himself up as the arbiter of truth.  The medication may, in fact, be dangerous to people with COVID-19.  Although the President no longer touts the drug, his purpose was not so much to promote it as to distort perceptions of reality.

• The Mueller report described ten instances of Trump’s illegal obstruction of justice for which anyone but a president could have been imprisoned.  For technical legal reasons, Mueller declined to recommend prosecution of the President.  But the report’s descriptions of the events make quite clear that the episodes of obstruction did, in fact, take place.  Nevertheless, absent prosecution, the President and his allies have asserted that he had been “completely EXONERATED” by the report, despite his own Attorney General’s acknowledgement that the report did NOT exonerate him.  His claim, however, is important not only for his projection of innocence, but also — and perhaps more importantly —his attempt to assert his “truth” against all others.  It is a denial that an objective Department of Justice investigation provides more access to the truth than his uncorroborated assertion does.  The President has been successful: Mueller’s report has been completely discredited among his supporters; even his detractors have largely given it up as an issue.   

• Trump has been asserting that the economy will start to turn positive after June (clinging tenaciously to a report of a 2.5% increase in jobs in May) and that “next year is going to be incredible.”  The Administration, however, has decided not to release its usual mid-year, updated projections on economic trends such as unemployment, inflation and economic growth, which would almost certainly contradict the President’s beliefs.  Trump must be right and his own economists wrong.

• Just this past week, the President sent federal law enforcement into the Washington streets, declaring that the rioters must be controlled.  In fact, however, there had been little violence from the protesters themselves, and it is not at all clear how much of the destruction was from protesters and how much from vandals, looters and petty criminals.  The Post’s Robert McCartney writes: “It seems clear that those crimes were committed by a small number of opportunists motivated by ideology, greed or both.”  Again, the President proclaimed his own truth and called out the National Guard and law enforcement from multiple other agencies to quell the “riots.”  The President had peaceful demonstrators violently cleared from Lafayette Park across the street from the White House in order that he could walk across the park for a photo-op.  DC officials deny that they needed help and accused Trump of politicizing the need for “law and order.”

None of this is fresh news.  Each (and 20,000 others) of these individual transgressions is serious enough, and many columns of news have been devoted to each one.  But it is the cumulative impact that is even more important.  Trump repeatedly creates false narratives of public events that have reflected badly upon him.  He attacks journalists with baseless accusations.  He denies the conclusions of his own experts.  He is creating a culture in which — for a large swath of people — he alone creates the truth.

Autocrats do not live for long in the sunshine.  Trump’s actions are serious preparation for autocracy when enough of the population must accept his lies. Because his life-long assumption that only he knows the truth, he may not be consciously aware of the deeper meaning of his lies. Trump’s consciousness — however fascinating it may be to attempt to understand it — is not the issue.  Regardless of what he thinks he is doing, he is, in fact, preparing the country for something new and dangerous in our politics.  It is hard to overestimate the importance to our democracy of his defeat in November. 

The President Pushes US Further Toward Autocracy

In response to the peaceful demonstration in Washington earlier this week, the Administration unleashed federal forces,** complete with riot gear, rubber bullets and gas. Across from the White House, they waded into the protesters, pushing them out of Lafayette Park — the iconic location of thousands of peaceful groups over the years — where the demonstrators had gathered in constitutionally protected protest against the Minneapolis killing of George Floyd a week earlier.

Attorney General William Barr had called out the law enforcement in order to make way for President Trump and his entourage to walk from the White House across the park to St. John’s Episcopal Church for a photo opportunity. Trump gathered a few administration officials around him, held up a Bible as a prop without comment and returned to the White House.

So, following the murder of a black man by white police, the President has responded to the demonstrators not by condemnation of the homicide but by violent force against them. What is clear is that the President has no conception of the history of violent racism within the country nor any plan to deal with it except through overwhelming violence … against those protesting the racism. What is also clear is that the President is willing to use the full range of physical, even military, force against domestic unrest.

President Trump has demanded that the governors use more force to “dominate” the streets, called for massive police presence, promised the use of “vicious dogs” and “ominous weapons,” and threatened to use US military force.

But the events this week are different, action rather than threat.

Time reports:

Multiple cargo planes, carrying active duty soldiers and supplies from North Carolina and New York, have flown into a military airfield. Members of the National Guard have rumbled around the capital region in armored vehicles to predetermined positions. And twin-engine UH-60 Black Hawk and UH-72 Lakota helicopters on Monday swept just above the tree-line over the capital’s streets, blasting an awestruck crowd of protestors below with a downwash of air, debris and fuel exhaust.

This is a new, extraordinary escalation of the President’s attack on democracy since long before his election.

Yes, the President has the legal right to do what he has done. But he is violating the constitutional rights of citizens and the most basic norms of our American democracy.

General James Mattis, Trump’s former Secretary of Defense who has until now felt it “inappropriate” for a former Cabinet member to criticize a sitting president offered a broadside worth reading in full:

The protests are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting that we live up to our values — our values as people and our values as a nation.” He goes on, “We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution.” …

“When I joined the military, some 50 years ago,” he writes, “I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens — much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.”

The President’s actions have brought us significantly closer to autocracy.

Greg Miller of the Washington Post writes

The scenes have been disturbingly familiar to CIA analysts accustomed to monitoring scenes of societal unraveling abroad — the massing of protesters, the ensuing crackdowns and the awkwardly staged displays of strength by a leader determined to project authority.,,,

“I’ve seen this kind of violence,” said Gail Helt, a former CIA analyst responsible for tracking developments in China and Southeast Asia. “This is what autocrats do. This is what happens in countries before a collapse. It really does unnerve me.”

Helt … said the images of unrest in U.S. cities, combined with President Trump’s incendiary statements, echo clashes she covered over a dozen years at the CIA tracking developments in China, Malaysia and elsewhere.

In his march toward autocracy, the President has crossed too many “red lines” for the metaphor to be adequate. This is a mark of the autocracy to which Trump has already brought us.

I’ll close with the words of General Michael Hayden, Director of the CIA under President Obama, who said after the debacle in Lafayette Park:

If Trump serves one term, it’s very, very bad, but I think we can stand it, and we can come back sooner or later. Two terms, we’re done. America will not be the same. Period.

 ______________
** The Justice Department said that mounted U.S. Park Police along with other law enforcement from National Guard units (from several other states); FBI; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; Drug Enforcement Administration; U.S. Marshals and Bureau of Prisons had all been involved.