Considering our shared pride in the country’s democratic history, there was remarkably little reference during the tedious coverage of the election results last week to a glaring fact: we don’t elect the candidate with the most votes.
There were hours of back-and-forth about whether the counting process for mail-in votes was efficient, fair, clean, even-handed, and auditable. There was mockery of Trump’s evidence-free accusations of fraud and of his partisans’ extraordinary chant of “Stop the Count!”
There was endless parsing of the voting
patterns in suburban Atlanta and the margin of Trump’s advantage in Appalachian
Pennsylvania. There was ample speculation about what kinds of legal challenges
might get a hearing before the Supreme Court now dominated by hard-line
Trumpians.
But in my time before the screens of
CNN, the networks, the online shows, and a dozen websites, there was not one
reference to the fact that the entire election was going to be decided on a
technicality, i.e., whether or not certain margins of victory in certain
arbitrarily drawn border lines favored one candidate or the other.
No one ever once looked at the camera
and said, “The voting citizens of the United States of America prefer, by a
convincing majority, Candidate X over Candidate Y.” Not even those appealing to
Trump to climb down from his baseless rants ever dared to suggest that Trump
should stand aside in the spirit of respect for democracy’s most primordial and
defining expression: majority rule.
Of course, the distortions of the
Electoral College are long established; everyone knows them from the outset and
has no choice but to play by those bizarre rules. Yet the unquestioned agreement
to ignore the profoundly anti-democratic nature of these same rules is another
form of collective amnesia. (And incidentally, if they consistently favored the
D team rather than the R team, you can bet we would be hearing about them
plenty.)
But the strange consensus that our most
important election is not democratic and doesn’t need to be reflects a deeper
reality: that what people want isn’t on the ballot at all. Popular will has no
virtually chance of becoming policy. Herein lies not only an insight into why
Trump’s 2016 victory was not a fluke but also a clear strategic path toward
making sure the Biden presidency does not collapse and pave the way for the
rule of Trump II, headed by someone far more adept than Trump and therefore orders
of magnitude more dangerous.
Trump won the first time around because
neither party had lifted any of its bipartisan fingers to take care of people’s
basic needs. They had presided over 40 years of wage deterioration and job
destruction, topped off by a massive housing fraud crisis that left 8 million
families in foreclosure. They then hastened to let off scot-free those
responsible for this debacle while Obama emitted soaring phrases about abstract
principles. Trump opportunistically denounced the ruling elite’s corruption,
promised to reverse it, and blamed immigrants.
It’s easy to shake one’s weary head in
disbelief that anyone, much less 70 million souls, could still consider Trump
presidential material four years later after his appalling record and crude
racism. That said, how do we explain the comfortable majority in Florida, many
of whom were stirred into action by fears of “socialism” and
Castro/Chávez-style dictatorship, who voted to establish a $15 minimum wage,
one of the key planks of Bernie Sanders’ campaign?
Furthermore, how do we explain the
ongoing popularity—depending on how it is phrased—of Medicare for All, i.e., a
healthcare system freed from the grip of for-profit insurance companies?
Even easier: how is it that Trump
voters not only were unimpressed with the accusations of Russian interference
in the 2016 election but also to this day show little enthusiasm for starting a
new set of wars? Probably most Biden voters also have no interest in going to
war with Russia or China or Iran—will we have our wishes fulfilled? In short,
does our voting preference have anything at all to do with the policies that
our “representatives” then adopt?
Our history is full of anti-democratic
tendencies, from the institution of chattel slavery that deprived people of
even autonomous personhood, followed by the systematic disenfranchisement of
the Jim Crow era and its more modern forms such as voter ID laws,
gerrymandering, purging of the rolls, and precinct restrictions. Women were
excluded, and political office still remains largely a male preserve 100 years
later. Republicans know that as a minority party representing minority
positions they can only remain in control through cheating.
But there are more subtle forms of
voter suppression as well, those at which Democrats excel because they involve avoiding
the kinds of voter mobilization that would subject them to pressure to fulfill
the few campaign promises they still feel obliged to make. AOC lambasted the
party leadership this week by outlining how she offered to help her colleagues
with their digital strategy, an offer taken up only by five candidates (who all
won). Party bosses were more enthusiastic about the Lincoln Project, which
flushed $60-some million down the commode producing TV nastygrams aimed at the
elusive Trump-hostile Republicans. Meanwhile, the national party again
short-changed the local state races that could have put them in a better
position for the redistricting that soon will occur based on the manipulated
Trump census.
Here in New York, grassroots operations
in Brooklyn again swept a slew of progressive candidates into the statehouse,
and the local poobahs don’t like it one bit. They prefer the old system with
low turnouts and widespread voter apathy that preserved the control of party
power brokers over who got to Albany and what they did there.
But the best example of what mainstream
Democrats typically refuse to do and what would happen if they did is the
admirable work done by Stacey Abrams in Georgia. Her voter registration
campaign brought an estimated 800,000 new voters into play, reversed Republican
voter suppression efforts, and clearly turned Georgia for Biden. That would
never have happened with the typical reliance on mindless TV ads that enrich
the permanent consultant class but don’t impress voters. Her work will take on
enormous significance now that two Senate races in Georgia are still up for
grabs, which will determine who controls that the upper chamber. If Democrats
were a bit more committed to democracy, they would imitate her example across
the country—but that would mean having to curry the favor of the energized new
voters rather than the financiers and lobbyists who form their real base.
Having elections is undoubtedly better
than not having them—I’ve lived under both systems and prefer the former. But
the notion that We the People express our will through our and votes and see
our wishes carried out in the halls of formal power is a nice dream that bears
little resemblance to how we actually live. It might even partly explain why 70
million people continue to support a guy who for four years performed like a
crude nightclub act and showed the country his rosy bum at the end of every
stand-up.
His voters blame “liberals” or some
variation of that title, sometimes including minority populations and Honduran
peasants who crept across the Texas border and supposedly have it great. Or
perhaps it’s hostility and resentment about prosperous urban woke-oids who take
virtuous positions on things that don’t affect them while ignoring the plight
of left-behind workers destroyed by de-industrialization, wage suppression,
opioids, and mortgage fraud. Maybe they resent the worshipful attitudes toward
Barack Obama who had eight years to address all those things and didn’t. Maybe
they have racialist attitudes as well, and being Americans that would hardly be
surprising. Maybe some of them resent blacks and still voted for Obama twice
before turning to a radical new version of Change.
This isn’t a defense of the Trump cult,
but rather a call to action to prevent it from morphing into something much
scarier than its current goofy manifestation. Florida showed Biden what he
might think about doing if he wants to swing the state back into the blue
column—serious action on the miserable wages American workers now “enjoy.” And
why not add relief from the crushing medical debt that Obamacare barely dented,
a lifebuoy for bankrupted college graduates looking for a way out of penury,
and a public works program massive enough to place a permanent support under
the job market?
A good way to start is with the national
COVID plan: why are we shooting ourselves in the collective foot by insisting
that we either have to close down economic activity to save ourselves from the
pandemic or let Grandma die? Why set up two hostile camps between the public
health/safety crowd and the get-us-back-to-work/we’re-going-under crowd?
Instead, stop the Federal Reserve money spigots from pumping up overpriced
financial assets (further enriching billionaires) and instead turn them onto
the working population and the drowning small businesses for the duration of
the medical emergency. Yes, this might require federal spending and facing down
opposition from Mitch McConnell. So do it! Confront the saboteurs, ream them
publicly on national TV night after night, denounce their obstructionism, and
call them enemies of the people. You have four years of precedent behind you.
If the election just held were truly an
exercise of popular sovereignty, this is exactly what would be happening in
Biden’s first weeks. Absent a massive uprising to demand a people-first
program, however, Biden is likely to sink into the familiar arena of favoring
his rich donors, making pattycake with his old buddies in the Senate, and coasting
along on autopilot. It will be called a “return to civility,” and the dissidents
like AOC and Bernie will be denounced for creating “division” if they don’t go
along. But the Warren Hardingesque “return to normalcy” the pundits now clamor
for won’t be enough. If they get their way, they’ll be weeping in 2024 and
wondering WTF happened—once again.
P.S. I was way off in my predictions of a decisive repudiation of Trumpism. I still think it will happen sooner or later.
P.P.S. If you wish to receive alerts of new posts, write tfrasca@yahoo.com
