Trump’s plot against the Electoral College

The blizzard of criminal charges against Donald Trump by the U.S. Department of Justice and Democratic office holders have an obvious political motivation—to prevent or hamper him from running for President in 2024.

But that doesn’t mean none of the charges have merit.  His “fake electors” scheme, whether or not it is judged to be a criminal offense, was a serious attempt to subvert the American political process.

In seven states carried by Joe Biden—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—self-appointed groups of people, not chosen by the voters, claimed to be electors and certified Trump as the winner.

In two cases, New Mexico and Pennsylvania, this was with the proviso that their certification only would take effect if the vote of the real electors was set aside.

The plan was for Republican Senators to certify the false electors’ choice.  Or for Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify the actual electors.

Disputes over the electoral vote would go to the House of Representatives, where decisions are made on the basis of one state, one vote, which would favor Republicans. Or the dispute could go to the Supreme Court, which has a conservative majority, three of whom were appointed by Trump himself.

Either way, the vote of the people would be set aside.

According to the indictment, Trump was guilty of violating laws which make it a crime to (1) conspire to deny people their basic rights, in this case, their right to vote, (2) to obstruct an official governmental proceeding and (3) to defraud the U.S. government.

This seems straightforward to me.  But the issue is clouded because the case is being treated as a disinformation vs. free speech issue, which it should not be.

Donald Trump had a perfect right to say the election was stolen, no matter how many people think otherwise.  He has as much right to express his opinion as you and I do.  But he doesn’t have a right to prevent the election certification from taking place.

If the prosecution goes beyond Trump’s actions and tries to prosecute Trump for his words, that will be a dangerous precedent.

Making false statements is not, in and of itself, a crime, for good reason.  To do so would make government officials the arbiters of truth.

How CIA lies affect U.S. politics, foreign policy

During the 2020 election campaign, Hunter Biden absent-mindedly left a computer in a repair shop and forgot about it.

The computer contained incriminating information about how Hunter used his influence with his father, Joe Biden, on behalf of corrupt oligarchs in Ukraine.

But 51 U.S. intelligence officers signed a letter saying the information had all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.  It turned out they were wrong.  The information was genuine.

There already was circumstantial information of the corrupt relationship, but the computer provided documentary evidence.

Now it turns out that the then CIA deputy director, Mike Morrell, circulated the letter and obtained the signatures after Antony Blinken, then part of Biden’s campaign team, now Secretary of State.

He admitted this in sworn testimony for the House Judiciary Committee.  This has gotten little attention so far.  

I expect the Democrats’ defense will be that Blinken didn’t make a direct request, but only dropped broad hints.  And the intelligence agency heads didn’t claim to have any evidence of Russian interference.  They were just expressing their opinions.  So you could argue that it was all an innocent mistake, although a big one.

But as the two Alecs – Alex Christofourou and Alexander Mercouris – point out, this is history repeating itself.  The whole Russiagate investigation was launched based on false information, the Steele Dossier, which had been commissioned by the Hillary Clinton campaign and was released in an attempt to reverse the outcome of the 2016 election.

Since 2016, Democratic politics has been all about linking the opponents of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden to Vladimir Putin.   The danger of all this, as the two Alecs point out, is that all this spills over into foreign policy.

If Putin commands forces that are capable of undermining American democracy from within, if every manifestation of discontent stems from Russians “sowing chaos,” then there can be no peace, and Biden’s goal of ruining Russia is correct.

The two Alecs are probably right.  If there had not been a Russiagate conspiracy, there might not have been a war in Ukraine.  There is no issue leading up to the war that couldn’t have been settled by reasonable compromise.

There is a parallel with the Bush administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.  As with Russiagate, every specific allegation was disproved.  But that didn’t stop the momentum for war.

LINKS

News Blackout in Effect by Matt Taibbi for Racket News.

New Testimony Reveals Secretary Blinken and Biden Campaign Behind the Infamous Public Statement on the Hunter Biden Laptop, a press release from the House Judiciary Committee.

Letter to Antony Blinken from the chairs of the House Judiciary Committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Public Statement on the Hunter Biden E-mails by 51 intelligence officials (2020)

Ex-CIA Chief Led Campaign to Smear Hunter Biden Laptop Story as Russian Disinfo by Connor Freeman for Antiwar.com.

State Dept. silent on Blinken role in ‘spies who lied’ letter by Steven Nelson for the New York Post.

Time to Get Spies Out of Politics by Matt Taibbi for Racket News.  [Added 04/25/2023]

‘Rigged’ election claims then and now

.

President Biden and other leading Democrats are aghast that so many Donald Trump supporters don’t accept the results of the 2020 election. But as these two videos by Matt Orfalea show, the shoe was on the other foot for the 2016 election.

First there was the campaign to persuade members of the Electoral College to vote for candidates other than the ones the voters chose.  

Then came the charges that the election result was somehow the result of a conspiracy between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.  All the specific claims in the bogus Russiagate scandal were debunked.  

Nevertheless Democrats proceeded with an impeachment trial on the claim that Trump had tried to obstruct the investigation of the nonexistent crime, which failed.  

Then they tried again for impeachment on the claim that Trump urged the President of Ukraine to investigate a corrupt corporation in his county for the purpose of discrediting Joe Biden.  This, too, failed.

Now they are pursuing criminal investigations of Trump’s business dealings and of his failure to turn over classified information.  Of course Trump may well be guilty of something and, if tried and convicted, he should pay the usual fine.

I think the motive for these investigations is to find something – anything – that would discredit Trump or possibly prevent him from running again.  I recall Democrats took a different stance about Hillary Clinton’s problems with handling classified information.

∞∞∞

Here’s the thing.  It is not a crime to claim that an election is rigged.  It is not a crime to deny that an election result is legitimate.  If you believe that, and say so, this is an expression of your right to free speech. 

I myself think there is a strong possibility that the 2016 election result was swayed by hacking of voting machines.  Tests of certain voting machines showed that the results could be altered, both on-site and remotely, and that there was no way to detect the results.

I’m not claiming this is evidence that Russians could have hacked these voting machines.  I’m claiming it is proof that almost anybody could have hacked these voting machines.

There were also widespread attempts to illegitimately purge voter rolls of black people.  Investigative reporter Greg Palast has been on this topic like a bulldog.  

I am certain that the result of the 2000 election was determined by illegal purging of voter rolls in Florida and may also have been influenced by a miscount of ballots.

It also is very possible that there was ballot-tampering in the 2020 election, although, if it was, it is just as likely that it was done by Republicans as Democrats.  Yes, Republicans are the ones making the most noise about this.   Recall the strategy of Karl Rove was to accuse one’s opponents of the thing you are doing yourself.

Once the election is held, it is too late to change the result.  There is a fine line between protesting the results of an election, which citizens have every right to do, and making an insurrection or coup to overturn the results.

Why I didn’t watch the Jan. 6 hearings

I don’t think the Jan. 6 investigations revealed anything new.  They reached a pre-determined conclusion on an issue most Americans had already made up their minds about, and few Americans care about.

The investigations would have had merit if they can explored why it was the police presence in Washington, D.C., and Capitol Hill specifically, was too small to deal with the mobs.  And why videos showed some Capitol police welcoming the Trump protesters into the Capitol building.  There are innocent explanations for both things, but I would like to know more.

There also would have been merit on hearings on whether legislation is necessary to protect the integrity of the presidential election process at the state level.  Some Republican states are considering legislation to give state legislatures the power to set aside the popular vote and make their own choice of Presidential Electors, or otherwise tampering with the voting process in presidential elections.   This is a real threat to the integrity of the election progress.

There was no chance that Vice President Pence could have changed the outcome of the election.  If Pence had refused to certify the electors, there would have been an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court calling on him to do his Constitutional duty.  If he refused to comply, there would have been some sort of work-around.  If neither of these things happened, the offices of President and Vice-President would have fallen vacant on Jan. 20 and, in accord with the Constitution, the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, would have become chief executive of the United States.

The whole national military-police-governmental-business establishment was opposed to Trump overturning the election.  If Sanders had been the Democratic nominee, the establishment might have allowed the election to be overturned, but he wasn’t.

Why Trump won in 2016 and lost in 2020

Donald Trump would have won the 2020 election if not for the Covid pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, according to political scientist Thomas Ferguson.

He explained why in an academic paper he co-wrote in November and an interview a couple of days ago on Paul Jay’s theAnalysis podcast.

Ferguson is known for his “investment theory of political parties.”  He sees American politic as a conflict between powerful economic interests, not between voting blocs.  The economic interests select and invest in candidates; the public gets to choose between the candidates the investors select.   

Trump was on the verge of losing in 2016 and was saved by a last-minute surge in campaign funding by wealthy donors who feared he would take the Republican Party down with him, Ferguson said.

Trump got campaign support from the oil and gas, coal mining, timber, agri-business industries, which he favored, The Koch brothers, for example, get their wealth from energy and other resources industries. 

I notice that these industries are based in parts of the USA in which states are over-represented in the Senate and Electoral College in proportion to their populations.  This was a big factor in 2020.

While Trump appealed to racial and nativist prejudice, Ferguson said this did not determine the outcome.

His protectionist trade policies were popular with industrial workers as well as manufacturing CEOs.  He got support from farmers because his administration compensated them for losses as a result of trade wars with China.  

All these things, together with the relatively good performance of the economy, put Trump in a good position to win in 2020, Ferguson said.

But his ineffective response to the Covid crisis cost him support from corporate executives and also college-educated Republicans who otherwise might have voted for him out of party loyalty.

The voters’ response to the 2020 strikes and protests movements is interesting and not easy to explain.  Usually, when there are civil disorders, there is a backlash in favor of the police and law-and-order.  This time was different.

Ferguson’s analysis showed that there was a correlation between counties in which there was an upsurge in Black Lives Matter, environmental and others kinds of protests, and counties in which there was strong support for Joe Biden.  The only exception to this were counties with large Hispanic populations.  Also, there was no correlation between Biden voting and wildcat labor strikes.

The point is that it is premature to count out Donald Trump and his followers.  President Biden and the Democrats need to do more than just be anti-Trump if they are to retain office.  They can’t afford to let the economy falter or Covid spread. [*]

###

Is the USA a democracy?

Paul Jay asked Ferguson whether he thinks the USA is a democracy.  Ferguson said democracy is an “honorific” term, not an analytical term.  No voting system, in and of itself, can empower the public to overcome the enormous concentration of wealth that exists in today’s USA, he said.

He said wage-earners in the USA and other rich Western countries do still have more rights than they do in Russia or China (although Ferguson acknowledged China’s economic achievements.)

And political disorder in the United States has not yet reached the point as it did in the late Weimar Republic, where political killings by para-military militias were an almost daily occurrence.

How worried should we be about a Trump coup?

Alfred W. McCoy, who’s observed many a military coup, thinks that a coup to keep President Donald Trump in power was, and still is, a real danger.

Trump’s attempt came in three stages, he wrote.

First there was a proposal by Michael Flynn, a former national security adviser, to invoke martial law to overturn the election.  

This was taken so seriously that all 10 living former Secretaries of Defense, including Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, issued an appeal to the armed forces to remain neutral in the coming struggle.  

Then a Trump loyalist in the Justice Department suggested the department intervene to challenge the legitimacy of the election result by charging fraud.  

When Acting Attorney-General Jeffrey Rosen refused, Trump threatened to replace him.  He only backed down when Trump’s own appointees at Justice, including the President’s counsel, threatened to resign as a group.

Finally there was an attempt to use the threat of force to prevent Vice President Mike Pence for certifying the election results.  A crowd of protesters broke through police lines to enter the Capitol (and in some cases were allowed in).  

The Defense Department refused a request by the Mayor of Washington, D.C., to send in the National Guard, which was on stand-by alert.  Finally the Secretary of the Army, bypassing the chain of command, gave permission for the Maryland National Guard to intervene.

Mike Pence, unable to find a legal justification for refusing to certify the vote, did his constitutional duty.

All this shows is that there is still respect for the rule of law in the USA, even among Trump appointees.  US American freedom and democracy aren’t quite dead, although they’re in bad shape. 

But the failure of the Trump coup also shows that he does not have the support of the types of people who support military coups in other countries.  I mean the top levels of the military, the “intelligence community,” the super-rich and the heads of big corporations.  

None of them have any reason to feel dissatisfied with Joe Biden.  I think the outcome would have been very different if the alternative to a Donald Trump had been someone such as Bernie Sanders, who threatened their power and wealth.

Then, too, conditions in the USA are much as if a kind of military coup has already taken place.  

The billionaire class is able to thwart popular and necessary legislation.  People live in fear of losing their livelihoods for saying the wrong thing.  A lawyer is going to prison for the crime of having won a lawsuit against a big oil company.  Torturers have impunity while truth-tellers are punished.

And yet, people whom I respect, argue that there is a real and present danger of something worse.  

And it’s true.  Things could be a lot worse than they are now.  Things haven’t reached the point where I, personally, think I have reason to fear—not yet.

LINKS

American Coup: a Recurring Nightmare? by Albert W. McCoy for Counterpunch.

The Whole Country Is the Reichstag by Adolph Reed Jr.

Why Trump supporters think 2020 was rigged

Last Friday a Twitter user named Darryl Cooper wrote a 35-tweet thread explaining the mindset of Trump supporters who think the 2020 election was rigged.

The thread was read verbatim on the Tucker Carlson show, and Cooper’s Twitter account went almost overnight from about 7,000 followers to about 70,000.

Glenn Greenwald invited him to write a summary of the thread for his Other Voices Substack account.  Although he did not agree 100 percent with Cooper, he thought Cooper’s viewpoint is important to understand. So do I.

Cooper said that for many years, most conservative Republicans, although they disagreed with the direction the country was moving, long had a basic confidence in the country’s institutions – the military, police and judiciary, the large corporations and even the press, which might be biased

This changed with the run-up to the 2016 elections and the victory Trump administration.  Intelligence agencies, Democratic politicians and the Washington press endorsed a conspiracy theory of Russian collusion which, it turned out, was based on opposition research conducted for the Hillary Clinton campaign.  Each of the claims were debunked one by one.

I happen to think Donald Trump was a terrible President.  But he was almost never attacked for the things he actually did wrong (nor was Hillary Clinton, for that matter).  Trump was attacked for his erratic statements, which didn’t matter, and for things he didn’t really do.

Cooper wrote:

Trump supporters know – I think everyone knows – that Donald Trump would have been impeached and probably indicted if Robert Mueller had proven that he’d paid a foreign spy to gather damaging information on Hillary Clinton from sources connected to Russian intelligence and disseminate that information in the press. Many of Trump’s own supporters wouldn’t have objected to his removal if that had happened.  [snip]

Trump supporters had gone from worrying the collusion might be real, to suspecting it might be fake, to seeing proof that it was all a scam. Then they watched as every institution – government agencies, the press, Congressional committees, academia – blew right past it and gas-lit them for another year.  [snip]

This is where people whose political identities have for decades been largely defined by a naive belief in what they learned in civics class began to see the outline of a Regime that crossed not only partisan, but all institutional boundaries. They’d been taught that America didn’t have Regimes, but what else was this thing they’d seen step out from the shadows to unite against their interloper president?

In the run-up to the 2020 campaign, the establishment press abandoned all pretense of neutrality, and, with the help of social media companies, imposed a news blackout on information that would help Donald Trump or hurt Joe Biden.

Is it any wonder, Cooper asked, that Trump supporters do not believe assurances from the Washington press corps and the Biden administration that the election was on the up-and-up?

Trump really did try to instigate an insurrection

The video above, introduced as part of the prosecution’s impeachment case against Donald Trump, underlines that the violence in the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6 was more than just a riot.

I had some doubts before as to how big a threat it was.  I don’t have such doubts any more.

The insurrection was intended to intimidate the Senate, and in particular Vice President Mike Pence, into refusing to certify the vote of the Electoral College.  It failed.  Vice President Pence and a majority of the Senate did their constitutional duty.

I don’t think that there ever was any serious possibility that the election results would be overturned.  Pence’s refusal to certify would not have changed anything in the end.

The harm that was done was to convince tens of millions of Americans that they are living under a government to which they owe no allegiance, any more than Americans of 1776 owned allegiance to King George III.

What bothers me is the thought of now things might have played out if the White House had been occupied by an authoritarian leader a little bit more self-disciplined and a little bit more astute than Donald Trump.

Such a leader would not have waited until after the votes were counted to question the voting system.  He and his followers would have sought court injunctions a year ago to block the changes they’re objecting to now.

When the game is over, it’s too late to question the rule book, because there’s no way to know how the game would have come out under different rules.

Such a leader would have a way to convince the FBI, the Pentagon, the CIA and the rest of the Homeland Security complex that he was on their side.  Experience in other countries shows that the police, the military and the intelligence agencies get along perfectly well with authoritarian rulers.

Such a leader would have had a real para-military force at his disposal—something comparable to Mussolini’s Blackshirts or Hitler’s Brownshirts (SA).

Trump gave winks and nods to encourage the Proud Boys and other authoritarian right-wing groups to think he was on their side, but he never (thank goodness) gave them effective leadership.  He never arranged for his supporters to secretly give them funds for recruitment and military training.

What happened on Jan. 6 could be a dress rehearsal for a right-wing coup to come.  A more astute authoritarian right-wing leader might well see all the possibilities that Trump’s attempt revealed and not make the mistakes that Trump made.

LINKS

Emotive video dominates day one of Trump impeachment trial by Niall Stanage for The Hill.

Insurrection TImeline: First the Coup and Then the Coverup by Steven Harper for Moyers on Democracy.  A more detailed timeline.

The martyrdom of Mike Pence by Sidney Blumenthal for The Guardian.  [Hat tip to Steve from Texas]  In the end, Pence did his duty.

Why flawed election results should be accepted

Click to enlarge.

A new poll shows that a majority of American voters believe that fraud determined the outcome of the 2020 Presidential election. This is astonishing.

For this to have happened, there had to have been a vast conspiracy, implicating, at a minimum, election officials in half a dozen states, state and local legislatures and governments, judges up to the Supreme Court, and the national press, news networks and social media.

They would all have to be complicit in stealing the presidential election while nonetheless allowing the Republican Party to gain House seats and state legislatures. The entire apparatus of the American government would be implicated in such a belief.

As improbable as all these seems, millions of hard-core Trump supporters believe it.

Of course it’s not as if Democrats would have accepted the results if Donald Trump had been re-elected.  After the 2016 election, some Hillary Clinton supporters tried to influence Electors pledged to Trump to vote for Clinton. 

I think that there are some voting irregularities in almost every election, and also some attempts by foreigners to influence the outcome of the election.  But the time to deal with these issues is before the election is held. 

Once votes are cast, it is too late because there is no way to know how the outcome would have been if the irregularities hadn’t taken place.  It is like asking the results of the baseball World Series be changed on the grounds that an umpire made bad calls.

The time to deal with voter suppression, voting fraud or election fraud is before the election.  The time to start fixing the system is the day after the previous election.

Some thoughts on democracy and insurrection

Protesters in Senate chamber. Source: ABC News

The basis of democratic government is a peaceful transition of power to the victor in an election.

If you think the result was wrong, you get a chance to try again the next election. If you think the voting process is corrupt or otherwise flawed, you have to fix it before the vote is held. 

Once you participate in an election, you commit to accept the result.  Otherwise the only appeal is to force.

The mob who stormed the Capitol yesterday did not accept the rules of democracy.

They may have done relatively little harm to life and property, compared to rioters in protests earlier this year and also compared to post-election rioters in other countries.

They only delayed the certification of the Electoral College vote for a few hours.  It wasn’t as if Congress was driven out and had to meet in a hotel somewhere.

And it is not clear to me at this point whether they really thought they could prevent the Electoral College vote from being certified, or whether they saw their action as a purely symbolic protest.  But whatever they thought they were doing, they were wrong.

The mob assembled in Washington in response to President Trump’s appeal to “stop the steal.”  It’s not clear to me that he intended what happened.  His record shows he does not think about the consequences of his actions.  He is like a vicious child playing with matches in a dynamite factory.

The Capitol Police were restrained and passive in dealing with the insurrectionists, compared with the way police often deal with peaceful environmental, anti-war or Black Lives Matter protestors.  I think that, under the circumstances, this probably was the right call.  A bloodbath would have been worse than anything that actually happened.

Still, many right-wing protestors in the United States think of themselves as supporters of the police, and many police appreciate this support.  Historically, revolution occurs when the police and military go over to the insurgents.  I think the events in Washington show there is potential for a more skillful demagogue than Trump to bring about a coup.

I don’t think that Republicans, self-described conservatives or even Trump supporters as a group are necessarily anti-democratic.  I don’t think that Democrats, self-described progressives or Trump haters are necessarily pro-democratic. 

I think yesterday’s insurrection was mild compared to the violence that would have been unleashed if Trump had won again by a narrow margin as he did in 2016.  Maybe I’m wrong about this, but I’m glad my thought wasn’t put to the test.

The various federal judges did not see evidence of voter fraud on a scale large enough to have changed the results of the Presidential election.  Indeed, based on the reporting of Greg Palast, I think Republican voter suppression is a bigger factor than anything Democrats have done.

But there are millions of devoted Trump supporters who think the election was stolen and the government illegitimate.  They constitute a threat to democratic government. 

The mainstream news media and the social media companies will respond to them by stronger measures to silence those who “sow discord.”  This, too, is a threat—possibly a greater one.

LINKS

It’s official.  Congress has formally recognized Joe Biden’s victory by Andrew Prokop for Vox.

MAGA Cosplayers Seize Capitol While Cops Flounder by Yves Smith for Naked Capitalism.

Capitol riots: Who broke into the building? by the BBC Reality Check Team and BBC Monitoring.  [Added Later]

Trump’s Wiemar America by Rod Dreher for The American Conservative.

Religious Meaning of MAGA Riot by Rod Dreher for The American Conservative.

Trump Has Proven the Country Is Ripe for a Right-Wing Coup by Ian Welsh.

MSM Media Already Using Capitol Hill Riot to Call for More Internet Censorship by Caitlin Johnstone.

Violence in the Capitol, Dangers in the Aftermath by Glenn Greenwald on Substack. [Added Later]

Religion and the U.S. political divide

It’s striking how religious divisions in the United State coincide with political divisions. It’s also striking how little the religious divisions have to do with theological beliefs.

Roughly 80 percent of white American evangelical Protestants vote Republican. Roughly 80 percent of Americans with no particular religion vote Democratic.

But this is not based on theological beliefs. Black American evangelical Protestants have the same theological beliefs as white evangelicals.

They believe in being born again and accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. But black evangelicals are as reliably Democratic and white evangelicals are Republican.

I can remember the 1950s, when theological beliefs were important. Evangelical Protestants thought Mormons were a “cult.”

Prior to the Second Vatican Council, many Unitarians and Universalists thought that Roman Catholics, not evangelical Protestants, were the people you had to watch out for, precisely because of their theology.

Nowadays sectarian religious beliefs are less important. The division is between those who cling to traditional religion, of whatever kind, and those who embrace modern and secular ways of thinking.

Conservative Protestants, Catholics and Jews are on one side and liberal Protestants, Catholics and Jews are on the other.  People who used to think each other were bound for Hell are now political allies.

The argument is not over specific religious doctrines, but over whether and how much to accept what’s called modernity, including, in recent years, the sexual revolution.

My hope used to be that the old-time live-and-let-live liberalism offered a way for people of differing opinions to live together, but this does not seem to be on offer.

LINKS

Secular ‘values voters’ are becoming an electoral force in the US – just look closely at 2020’s results by Phil Zuckerman, professor of sociology and secular studies at Pitzer College.

What the election tells us about religion in America by Jennifer Rubin for The Washington Post.

In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace by the Pew Research Center.

It’s still the economy, stupid

Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were elected President primarily because of the economic failures of their predecessors.  Each of them faced a backlash in the midterm elections following their victories, at least partly because of their economic policies.

The same thing will happen to Joe Biden unless he can act decisively and quickly to meet the impeding economic and pandemic crises, according to political scientist Thomas Ferguson in an interview with podcaster Paul Jay. 

Clinton ran in 1992 on the slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid.”  But during his two years, he did little to improve the economy.  He pushed through the North American Free Trade Agreement, which had been part of the Reagan agenda and was opposed by organized labor.  He failed to get Congress to even consider a health insurance reform bill.  Republicans won control of both houses of Congress in 1994

Obama was elected during the 2008 recession.  His administration rescued failed banks, but did not fully implement a law to rescue victims of foreclosures.  Republicans won control of the House of Representatives in 2010.

The decisive factor in the 2016 election was the voters, of all races, who supported Obama in 2008 and 2012, but either voted for Trump and declined to vote at all in 2016. 

The notion that racism and sexism were the primary factors driving the Trump vote is not borne out by the data, he said.  Economics was very important too.  Trump’s promise to revitalize manufacturing and impose tariffs on imports gave him just enough votes to squeeze out a majority in key industrial states.

The rural working-class found their lives a little better under Trump and don’t believe the Democrats care about them.  Some of this was the momentum of the economic recovery that had begun under Obama.  Much of it, according to Ferguson, was due to the Federal Reserve System artificially pumping up the economy by holding down interest rates.

He said polls indicate Biden’s margin of victory came from voters in the income brackets between $100,000 and $200,000—not the ultra-rich, but not the wage-earning class, either—who are uncertain about their economic future.  Biden’s message was reassurance and a promise of economic stability.

Trump’s gains among Mexican-American voters along the Texas border were due to so many of them working in the oil and gas industry, he said; some of them found construction work in building Trump’s border wall.

The received wisdom is that big business leaders supported Biden over Trump because they thought Trump is too erratic.  Biden did get a lot of campaign contributions from Wall Street, but much of corporate America supported Trump—the oil and gas industry, the pharmaceutical industry and pollution-heavy industries such as pulp and paper making.

There’s no such thing as ‘the Hispanic vote’

LatinX-plaining the election by Antonio Garcia-Martinez for The Pull Request.

“Lambert Strether” on U.S. politics, 2016-2020

“Lambert Strether” is a contributor to the Naked Capitalism web log. Here’s his idea of how U.S. politics has changed in the past four years.  I think he’s right, and my bet is that politics will change even more in the next four years.

• The Professional Managerial Class (PMC) attained class consciousness.
• The PMC was and is embubbled by a domestic psyop.
• The press replaced reporting with advocacy.
• Election legitimacy is determined by extra-Constitutional actors.
• “Fascism” became an empty signifier, not an analytical tool.

Read his full post to see what he means. The comment thread is good, too.

LINK

“What It Took”: The Price of Democrat Victory in 2020 by “Lambert Strether” for Naked Capitalism.  A brilliant analysis and an interesting comment thread.

Nine reasons for the GOP to be happy about 2020

If I was a partisan Republican, I would be happy with the 2020 election results as reported so far.

1.   The GOP no longer has to make excuses for the antics of Donald Trump.
2.   Democrats have to explain away the apparent cognitive decline of Joe Biden.
3.   As the incumbent, Joe Biden will get the blame for the looming interconnected economic, medical, climate, political and international crises.
4.   Biden’s likely Democratic successor will be the unpopular Kamala Harris.
5.   The GOP continues to increase its share of the Hispanic vote, the fastest-growing U.S. demographic category.
6.   The GOP has a chance to keep its majority in the U.S. Senate.
7.   The GOP gained seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
8.   Six of the nine Supreme Court justices are conservatives appointed by Republicans.
9.   The GOP increased its representation in state legislatures in time for the post-2020 redistricting.

Was Trump too incompetent to create a crisis?

Donald Trump (Getty Images)

I worried a lot about the possibility of a Constitutional crisis following this year’s national elections.  I feared Donald Trump would somehow sabotage the election process.  I worried about possible violence.

None of my fears of come true. We Americans can look forward to a peaceful transition of power, with nothing worse than hard feelings by the losers.

Maybe my fears were overblown.  But maybe we Americans dodged a bullet.

Rod Dreher, an editor of The American Conservative, noted that President Trump had threatened a massive legal challenge to the election results—like the Florida recount, but spread across many states.

But he never did anything to bring this about.  Dreher quoted the Wall Street Journal—

Some advisers have privately said they see little path forward, politically or legally, that would prevent Mr. Trump from becoming the first president to lose reelection since 1992.

Among the president’s advisers, finger-pointing over the campaign’s legal strategy has intensified in recent days, White House and campaign aides said. 

Aides have expressed acute frustration over what many see as a slapdash legal effort, complaining that—even though Mr. Trump spent months telegraphing his intent to fight the election outcome in the courts—there wasn’t enough planning ahead of Election Day and has been little follow-through on decisions made this week. 

For days after the election, advisers said they didn’t know who was in charge of the strategy.

Dreher himself added—

You got that?  Trump has known for months that this thing might conclude with a hellacious legal fight, but hasn’t bothered to put together a legal team to fight it.  The WSJ also reported that Trump has named longtime conservative political operative David Bossie to head his legal team.  Bossie isn’t a lawyer.  This is not a serious effort.  MAGA is done.

I can’t see the up side of fighting for Trump at this point, not only because this Biden win seems decisive, but also because Trump hasn’t taken the fight to defend his presidency seriously.  The Journal story is pretty incredible … but about what you would expect from a president whose mouth writes checks the rest of him can’t cash. 

Seriously, how is it that you spend months telling your supporters that you are going to fight this in court if you have to, but then half-ass the legal prep? 

When the GOP went down to Florida in 2000 to wage legal war in the Bush-Gore contest, they sent the lawyer equivalent of Seal Team Six.  Now?  The fact that Trump doesn’t take this seriously telegraphs to conservatives how seriously we should take him from now on.

Yesterday the WSJ editorialized that Republicans are correct to put an eagle eye on voting, especially in Philadelphia, but said that Trump is going to have to prove his allegations in court. 

So far, it doesn’t seem that Trump’s claims are very strong.  My sense is that most Americans are going to want this thing settled, and don’t have the stomach for a long, drawn-out argument.  Civil society is pretty fragile right now.

Source: Rod Dreher.

Why was this election even close?

Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter With Kansas?, Listen, Liberal and The People, No! talks with broadcaster Paul Jay about the 2020 election and the future of the Democratic Party.  You can read a transcript on Jay’s theAnalysis.news.

Why were the polls so wrong?

The polls are wrong because (1) most people aren’t interested in talking to pollsters and (2) the ones who do respond aren’t a cross-section of the public, partly because (3) educated Trump supporters often lie about their preferences.

LINKS

Is the Era of Polling Over? by Kevin Drum for Mother Jones.

Who are the real Shy Trumpers? by Eric Kaufmann for UnHerd.

The 2020 election hasn’t really settled anything

Trump’s election plan (in addition to standard voter suppression, like having almost no machines in poor ridings [election districts]):

1. Tell Republicans not to vote by mail, and claim there is a lot of fraud.
2. Have DeJoy, his man in the Post Office slow down and damage mail delivery, slowing down ballot delivery and losing ballots.
3. Have Republican legislatures in important states forbid counting mail in and early vote ballots before election day.
4. If the election is close, go to court to stop the counting of votes after election day.

Source: Ian Welsh

As of this morning, it looks as if this strategy has failed, mainly because the courts didn’t co-operate, and Joe Biden is virtually certain to win an Electoral Vote majority.

But if President Trump hadn’t mishandled the coronavirus pandemic, or hadn’t had so many obvious character flaws, he might well have won the election fair and square.

The basic reason Biden gave voters to support him is that he isn’t Donald Trump.  Anybody else would be better, and Biden was someone else.

The Democrats in this election were backed by big business.  In money terms, they massively out-raised and out-spent the Republicans. 

Joe Biden’s campaign promises were (1) to not enact Medicare for All, (2) to not support a Green New Deal and (3) to not ban fracking. 

The main achievement he boasted of was beating Bernie Sanders.  The main reason he gave for voting for him was that he wasn’t Donald Trump.  That was enough—but just barely.

Democratic support among key constituencies continued to erode, as it did in the previous two Presidential elections.

Let’s be very clear: the Democratic Party screwed this election up massively.  Trump actually did better than he did in 2016 in areas with high COVID-19 deaths.  Union members in Ohio appear to have gone for Trump, and most of the people who saw the economy as the top issue voted for Trump, even though this should theoretically be the issue on which the Democratic Party is strongest.

Source: Current Affairs.

Preliminary exit polls indicate that the Republicans increased their vote share among woman, African-Americans and Hispanics, including poor Mexican-Americans in south Texas who’ve historically been reliable Democratic voters for maybe a century.

The result is that Republicans will probably keep control of the Senate, increase their representation in the House of Representatives and keep control of enough state legislatures to keep their gerrymandering advantage.

Neither Democrats nor Republicans have the upper hand.  What this means is that things will continue just as they are, except that Donald Trump will no longer be using the White House as a stage for his psychodrama.

After the election: links 11/5/2020

Wall Street Warms to Democratic White House, Republican Senate by Matt Phillips and Kate Kelly for the New York Times.  (Hat tip to Steve from Texas)

Why are the media reporting different election results? by Martin Belam for The Guardian.

Biden campaign gears up for legal warfare as he nears 270 by Natasha Purecki, Elena Schneider and Alex Isenstadt for POLITICO.

The U.S. Inability to Count Votes is a National Disgrace – And Dangerous by Glenn Greenwald.

Trump gains in all groups but white men

I didn’t see this coming.

According to the Edison Exit Poll, President Trump increased his share of the vote among Hispanics, African-Americans and white women this year compared to 2016, but lost some ground among white men.  The same was true of Trump’s vote in 2016 compared to Romney’s in 2012.

LINK

Trump gains with Latinos, loses some white voters by Chris Kahn and James Oliphant for Reuters.

A choice between bad and worse

I voted by mail several weeks ago for Howie Hawkins, the Presidential candidate of the Green Party.

My idea was to send a message that neither Donald Trump or Joe Biden is acceptable.  I would vote for Jo Jorgenson of the Libertarian Party if she were the only alternative.

The question is not, as in the last few Presidential elections, which candidate has the best policies. 

The question is whether either of them are capable of dealing with the coming perfect storm of emergencies—the pandemic, unemployment, a financial crisis, disruptions in international trade and emergencies caused by drought, fires, floods and storms brought on by global warming.

Based on their records, I have no confidence in either of them.

I live in New York state, which is virtually certain to go for Joe Biden, so nothing was at stake in my vote.

I think there is great danger of civil disorder if Donald Trump claims victory tomorrow night on the basis of early returns or if he actually ekes out a narrow victory.

His margin of alleged or real victory, if there is one, would almost certainly be the result of purging of voter rolls or manipulating the election progress. Greg Palast has done good reporting on this.

And most major and many small U.S. cities have had George Floyd protests, so there is a core group that is ready and able to mount a protest on short notice.

I don’t know how I would have voted if I lived in a swing state. I certainly would not have voted for Donald Trump, but I don’t think I could have brought myself to vote for Biden.

LINKS

The Day Before the U.S. Election by Ian Welsh.

Donald Trump Exposed Truths About Both Parties by Ross Douthat for The New York Times.

How Trump damaged science—and why it could take decades to recover by Jeff Tolletson for Nature.

Deluge After the Donald? by Ted Rall.

We Can’t Follow Obama Back to Brunch by David Sirota and Andrew Perez for The Daily Poster.

Countdown to Election 2020

Will the Election Be Close or Contested? What to Expect From Trump and Biden by Mark Niquette for Bloomberg.

Preparing for Electoral Unrest and a Right-Wing Power Grab: an analysis by Peter Gelderloos for Crimethinc.  In-depth analysis by an anarchist.

Americans Increasingly Believe Violence Is Justified If the Other Side Wins by Larry Diamond, Lee Drutman, Tod Lindberg, Nathan P. Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason for POLITICO.

What a 21st century civil war would look like

Patriot Prayer rally. Source: US Defense Watch.

I think there is a real possibility of civil war in the United States—not all-out war as in 1861-1865, but an intermittent, continuing conflict like The Troubles in Northern Ireland in 1968-1998.

Whatever the outcome of the Presidential election, the losing side will not accept it as legitimate.  Democrats will point to illegal purging of voting rolls and other tampering with the election process.  Republicans will point to slanting and censorship of the news by big media and high-tech companies to favor Biden.

Many Democrats think President Trump is a puppet installed by Vladimir Putin to undermine the U.S.  Many Republicans believe the Q-anon story of a secret struggle against a conspiracy of pedophiles.

I’m not going to argue the relative merits of these beliefs.  The point is that they are widely held.  Democratic leaders didn’t accept the legitimacy of Trump’s 2016 victory.  They tried to block him from taking office by manipulating the Electoral College and then tried to impeach him on far-fetched grounds.

Along with this there are armed factions already in the streets—the revolutionary faction in the George Floyd protests and the armed right-wing militias.

Black Lives Matter originated as a non-violent protest movement.  But the conflict in Northern Ireland also originated with non-violent protests, conducted on behalf of the Catholic minority there.  The conflict didn’t stay non-violent because the Provisional IRA and the Protestant militias joined in.

One of the lessons of the Northern Ireland conflict is that when civil war breaks out, it is difficult or impossible for the government to put down both sides.  Inevitably, it lines up with one faction or another.

So could it be in the United States.  A Biden administration would tilt toward the Black Lives Matter faction.  A Trump administration would tip toward the right-wing militias.  Democratic and Republican mayors would have their own agendas, as would Homeland Security and state and local police. 

Things could get complicated, very quickly.   We see these kinds of alignments forming right now..

I of course hope that this doesn’t play out as I fear, or that, if it does, violent conflict soon dies down to the point where it can be controlled. 

But with a looming economic crisis, an ongoing pandemic and continuing climate-related crises, I fear the USA is headed for a tipping point, and I do not know what the results would be.

On Oct. 26, 1860, few Americans, North or South, expected or wanted a civil war.  A year later, they were fighting one.  I doubt that, in 1968, the people of North Ireland, Protestant and Catholic, wanted or expected decades of conflict.  But they were forced to choose sides, whether they wanted to or not.

LINKS

A New Civil War: News & Opinion Aggregator.

Could America Split Up? by Damon Linker for The Week.

Is a New Civil War Possible? by Rod Dreher for The American Conservative.

Over half of voters expect violence, disagree on election legitimacy by Ledyard King for USA Today.

The Northern Ireland Conflict, 1968-1998 by John Dorney for The Irish Story.

Donald Trump’s big accomplishment

Trump’s Biggest Economic Legacy Isn’t About the Numbers by Patricia Cohen for the New York Times.  Hat tip to Steve from Texas.