This post is a few years late, granted, but then again, maybe this is the best time for this.
It’s really bad that people deny the elections, right?
It’s undermined the function of our Democracy, and is the beginning of the path to fascism?
Here’s where I think I’m supposed to insert a list of videos of Democrats denying the results of the election that Trump won.
The thing is, though - election fraud has happened; it will happen again. I know my grandfather witnessed it, in his days working for the election department.
If you aren’t allowed to say that an election was fraudulent - whether by legal means or social norms - it kind of becomes kind of difficult to fight against election fraud.
So, apart from the standard hypocrisy, where it’s bad when they do it but good when we do it - suppose, for a moment, you have a genie in front of you, who offers you a single wish, which you may make, or not: Nobody can ever deny the results of elections again. Do you make that wish?
I don’t think anybody reading this is likely to be dumb enough to take the genie up on that offer. But maybe what you do want is some kind of state apparatus to ensure that these claims … wait, that’s no good either. Okay, what if we just make sure that nobody who denies elections can ever win an election? Well …
When you get down to it, what exactly do you want? A return to the social norms where this -wasn’t- the very loud, very public default for the losing party whenever they lose an election? Well, it’s been the default for … 23 years now, at least. Hanging chads. Birth certificate. Russian interference/collusion/hacking/whatever. And then the mess of the 2000 election.
The form changes slightly with each iteration, but, like - seriously, get over it. People think the election was invalid, for whatever reason they can come up with. The world marches on.
Except, it’s kind of stumbling, this time. Not in the fact that people still believe it; people harped about how Al Gore was the real victor for years, people harped about how Obama wasn’t legally allowed to be president for years, and the Russian nonsense is certainly still shambling along. But in the way it has become a central focus for “Everything bad in the Republican party.”
And I don’t think it has anything to do with “election denial”. It’s basically just another excuse to say how terrible Trump is.
Guys, hate to tell you this, but Trump was kind of a boring president. It was business as usual, as far as government goes. Loud? Yeah. Obnoxious? Yeah. The US elected a reality TV show star; they got exactly what they wanted, at least in terms of his public persona.
This extends to Biden, as well, who I’ve found myself increasingly defending, as even the left is turning on him. Yeah, I don’t think he’s in prime physical or mental condition, but - he’s been, basically, a boring president. It is business as usual. Like Trump, I’m not a fan of his policies, but let’s face it, the US is never going to elect a president I -like-.
Business as usual is both good and bad; I think we have some serious institutional issues which have … look, none of us think the government is perfect. We all want it to change. But, well, we can’t actually agree on -how- it should change, in what direction it should go. We’ve plucked all the low-hanging fruit, all the trivial changes that could make things better. Every iterative change involves increasingly complex trade-offs.
Realistically, at this point, the best any individual can hope for is to feel heard. Obama did this for some people, but not others. Trump did this for those others, but left the first group out.
Meanwhile I’m standing over here in my corner being annoyed that y’all piss your pants whenever your team loses. Election deniars aren’t what’s wrong with the world; they’re an annoying media circus that repeats every few years, and the people decrying them this cycle, will be them in the next.
Thing is, there’s going to be some problems with every election. Some of them - the person running for governor being in charge of the government organization responsible for tallying votes - probably we should fix those. But going forward, because we don’t have a time machine.
But also - we really do need to fix some things that have nothing to do with elections, and everything to do with - the media. Not the mainstream media, not conservative media - media as a whole. I see promising signs of things maybe being fixed, which is good.
And maybe we need to look at something else. Those trade-offs; both the ones we have made, and the ones we continue to make.
See, every change has some trade-offs. But the only changes that get implemented are those where those making the changes don’t suffer the trade-offs. Let’s try minimum wages; super-important, right?
What are the trade-offs? Don’t tell me the millionaires are paying the trade-offs for these policies; trust me, they’ll do just fine. Indeed, it is in a lot of their economic best interests to raise minimum wage; see, if your profits are reliably 10% of your income, and your costs increase in a way that doesn’t make you any less competitive, because all your competitors are similarly burdened - well, you raise prices, they raise prices, and everyone has 10% of an even bigger income stream.
That “less competitive” thing is important, mind. See, if you own a factory in a state with a higher minimum wage than a neighbor, maybe your competitors are hit harder than you are. And if you’re in an industry where overseas competitors are a significant concern, well, you’re just shit out of luck.
Minimum wage isn’t just about the class war between the lower classes and the upper classes. It is, in a significance sense, about an economic war between the manufacturing and service sectors. And insofar as it is about a class war - it doesn’t go in the direction you think. See, that neighboring state with lower minimum wages?
They’d love to have higher wages, too. Because the people at the short end of the stick are those who are the least economically productive. If you live in New York City, an increase in the national minimum wage benefits you, personally, while being punitive on rural people, whose only counterbalance against your massive economic network effect advantage is their ability to provide lower-cost labor.
Or, to pick an older example that is already going out of fashion - the way we handle sexual assault charges, in, say, colleges. Want to guess at the racial and/or economic distributions of the men - and as far as I can tell it is, within a margin of error, basically just men, nevermind the actual statistical distribution of sexual assault - who get kicked out of colleges for sexual assault accusations they have little recourse to combat? (See, you really don’t want to kick out the student who can afford to sue you. But the student who can’t?)
What about abortion? If you have a little bit of money, it’s inconvenient to travel to another state. If you don’t?
Whose interests are traded off in free trade? In immigration? In barber shop licensing? In mandatory insurance plans with high deductibles?
The burdens of every trade-off we make keep falling on the same groups of people - and it’s almost always the people we’re purportedly trying to help.
No shit people vote for somebody who makes them feel heard. No shit they feel like there are vast conspiracies working against them. And no shit they get pissed off and blame the conspiracies when the people who make them feel heard lose an election.
There is some validity to the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats, mind. And we have kept making these trade-offs precisely because they benefit the majority of us, and the majority in question has shifted enough for each individual trade-off that we make that most people are better off, even so.
But for somebody for whom politics is very much a three-steps-forward-and-two-steps-backwards kind of experience, I think, to drop the P word, it reeks of privilege to lambast them for not being happy about the fact that they do keep getting the short end of the stick. Especially when you won’t even acknowledge that you’re doing it.
I’m talking about race, here, to be clear - black people are one of the groups that keep getting the short end of the stick. But I’m also talking about rural people, and poor white people - if we separated out white people into two racial groups, poor white people are not only kicked in the teeth as much as black people, they’re told that complaining about it is privilege. I’m talking about men, I’m talking about women, I’m talking about people with mental illness, Asian people, Catholics, Southern Baptists, atheists, Jewish people, Islamic people. I’m talking about gay people, and I’m also talking about heterosexual people. Cis people, and trans people. Incels, femcels, chads, stacies, furries, poly, monogamous.
If the left says the right hates them - I’m talking about them. And if the right says the left hates them - I’m talking about them too.
See, every majority is just a collection of minorities we’ve mentally cobbled together into a single gestault, so that we can justify thinking - they have enough power to stop this, so okay if we do it to them. See the issue?
And no, the fix isn’t to roll back changes, or to make new trade-offs that will ineveitably, through the political process ensuring that a majority approves of a thing, end up benefiting a majority while some minority pays the costs.
Because here’s the thing: None of us have just one label. We’re all minorities on some axis. Except maybe Joan; she’s the only person in the entire world who isn’t a minority in some way, she’s in the majority on every single axis. Which - makes her a minority. As Ayn Rand wrote, the smallest minority on Earth is the individual.
So all of us have our interests traded off, routinely. Quit. Fucking. Denying. It.
Because people want to at least feel like they’re being heard. It’s the easiest thing it the world to just say - “Yeah, I know this policy hurts you, and that’s a bad thing. But it helps more people overall, and that’s a good thing, and we’ll try to keep you in mind with the next trade-off.”
That said - segregation, both in its old form and its new. I recently looked for a redeeming quality in George Wallace, after I started to write something about how bad and awful he was, and, well - I don’t think that particular individual, or the social movement he represented, actually had a redeeming quality. And that realization, spaced across decades, makes me feel a little more comfortable with the fact that I don’t think the modern incarnation of the social justice movement has a redeeming quality, either, whatever its high-minded rhetoric, and I am glad to see the tail end of it.
But these are the exceptions, rather than the rule - and I spent time and effort to listen to what they had to say. What they had to say, mind, not what somebody else said that they had to say. I’ll confess I didn’t do a great job of that with Wallace, just because, well, at this point it’s difficult to get a good honest representation of him.
But ultimately, I don’t think Wallace, or his followers, were evil, exactly, any more than I think the social justice movement is evil. I think they were and are, like all of us, frightened children in a chaotic world, who clung to the familiar, to the detriment of not just others, but themselves as well.