When does just being wrong cross over into insanity? Einstein had an answer during his debate with the proponents of quantum theory (mechanics) in the 1920’s. The quantum theory presented the possibility of unpredictability in the atomic and subatomic world: identical circumstances can produce different results. Flippantly, Einstein threw off the one-line response, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Thus, according to Einstein, quantum theory proponents such as Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg were engaging in folly.
Today, we have good reason to know better. Micro reality behaves differently than macro. Einstein’s explanation of the cosmos (macro) can’t account for activity in the atomic and subatomic realm (micro).
However, applying Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle to human affairs would be an invitation to chaos. Out the window would go any universal principles like deductive/inductive reasoning, equal protection of the laws, rules of due process, standards of decency, human rights, anything regarding the proper regulation of human conduct in a society, the scientific method itself if taken to an extreme. Yet, that is where we are going. We are heading back into places that were known to be thickets of danger and malevolence.
Passion and bias overwhelm good sense. Indeed, that happenstance may be the only true constant in human conduct through the ages, down to the present, and into the future.
We pride ourselves in being better than our ancestors, progressives being the most hubristic. Their entire belief system is based on it. Yet, an earlier incarnation of today’s progressives produced improvements in how a democracy registers the will of the people, advances that modern progressives are busy dismantling. Is this “progress” or a return to an atavistic past, one that their ideological ancestors were trying to escape?
Einstein’s insanity definition is fully operational when it comes to the Democratic Party’s efforts to shred the accomplishments of 19th century progressives. Back then, progressives were aghast at the corruption of a powerful few in smoke-filled backrooms. Their efforts at broad political, economic, and social reform were thwarted by a clique with the power to manipulate elections. Before they could accomplish anything, elections must be cleaned up. The process must be professionalized with nonpartisan administration of elections, clean voter rolls, the secret ballot, and diligent prosecution of fraud. Only then, they believed, could they circumvent the self-serving few stuffing the ballot boxes.
After, other election reforms would kick in: the popular election of Senators, popular vote primaries, the referendum, initiative, and recall. More democratization, but first in clean elections, was thought to be the cure. Now, it’s back to stuffing the ballot box. Democrats resist efforts to make voter rolls match the actual eligible warm bodies in a precinct, like removal of the dead and noncitizens or those who moved. They thwart voter ID initiatives, whose purpose is to ensure that the person showing up to vote is actually the person on the list. And they are enthusiastic proponents of mail-in balloting, unmonitored drop boxes, the third party harvesting of ballots, same-day registration, voting beyond election day, the kinds of proposals that place a huge question mark over election integrity. What could go wrong? Is it completely unreasonable to find these ideas at least troubling?
Not for Democrats. They don’t have misgivings, blinded as they are by the rhetorical device of “disenfranchisement”, the bogeyman of systemic racism, a zeal to win elections at all costs, and making it so easy to vote that the insentient, uninterested, and those desiring to vote and vote often have an open field. Public faith in the result is sacrificed in the fury of everyone, dead or alive, having a ballot(s) in their hand. My sons still receive California absentee ballots years after ID and registration in Montana.
The New York Times in a brief moment of sanity declared, “Voting by mail is now common enough and problematic enough that election experts say there have been multiple elections in which no one can say with confidence which candidate was the deserved winner” (see below). My faith in elections has taken a hit since easy-to-voting/easy-to-cheat has become the official doctrine of the Party and in jurisdictions under its control.
Their whole scheme was encapsulated in the Democrats’ Senate Bill 1 of 2021, the horribly misnamed “For the People Act”. All of the above would be imposed on the entire country if a couple of Democrat Senators had decided to follow the rest of the lemmings over the cliff.
Far from leaving the Democrats’ Tammany Hall past in the dust, they are now embracing it. The single biggest threat to election integrity is the mail-in ballot. Think about it: instead of a ballot given to a confirmed eligible voter in front of many witnesses, and the person is observed going to a booth to secretly mark it, and it is dropped into the box under the eye of a nonpartisan official, the Democrats want to shotgun ballots in the mail. Yes, participation will increase . . . but by whom?
The ballots lie on the floor in piles in apartment mailrooms. Multiple ballots are delivered to a single residence and what happens to them once taken inside is anyone’s guess. The sole bow to authentication is a Boy-Scout-oath signature on a perjury line. So much for the single ballot reflecting the conscience of a single person. It doesn’t take the imagination of Lewis Carroll to picture what might be happening beyond the domicile’s door. Add the likelihood of a partisan activist delivering and collecting the things (ballot harvesting) – and who knows what else they’re doing – and no wonder I’m ready to throw up my hands and be done with voting.
The Democrats forestall any steps to allay concerns. They glibly point to the rarity of voter fraud prosecutions. Get real, they’ve created a system that makes it hard to identify fraud. The signature on a mail-in ballot is no guarantee of authenticity because it was produced in the same manner as the marked ballot – behind a closed door. Once the things are collected and delivered, they are shorn of their envelopes and placed in piles. Authentication is gone, gone forever.
How can fraud be uncovered at this point? People have to be extremely stupid to be caught. Prosecutions are a measure of stupidity and not election integrity. The secret ballot is dead, dead!
Slipshod voting is as bad as slipshod policing. In the latter, you may get killed, pistol-whipped, or face wrongful prosecution. With the former, you will be ruined by political hucksters. Come to think about it, what’s the difference?
Under the skin of today’s Democratic Party progressives is an old-fashioned and venal Tammany Hall ward heeler. They are back to a deeply rooted behavior that progressives of an earlier incarnation would find abhorrent and a bit insane.
The other party, the current Republican Party, hews even more closely to Einstein’s definition. A significant block of the Party can’t shake its fetish for Donald Trump no matter how many times he embarrasses the Party and its electoral chances. This influential chunk of the Party’s base would rather die on the hill of confrontation than make room for the part of the electorate who are 70% with them but can’t take the juvenile boorishness. This blinkered part of the party can’t get their heads around the fact that politics is about addition and not subtraction. Reliance on the cult-of-personality cohort in the party’s base to choose nominees will only guarantee more Democrat inaugurals.
You’d think that the November 2022 midterms would wake them up. No such luck. Back then, in many key primary races when a more experienced and more popular candidate in relation to the Democrat frontrunner squared off against a Trump-endorsed one for statewide offices (Senator for example), the Trumpist won and then proceeded to lose the general. The current Democrat majority in the Senate owes much to Trump’s endorsement of untested and “anti-establishment” candidates.
Einstein’s insanity still afflicts a majority of the party’s base. They are proving it weekly. A spate of polls in January 2023 exhibits the same tendency. Emerson, Morning Consult, and Harvard Harris show Trump besting DeSantis by 26, 19, and 20 points respectively for the nomination. Public opinion is fluid with polls providing only a snapshot, albeit a fuzzy one. Still, Republicans show that they can’t seem to kick their Trump fix.
Trump’s stature with the general electorate is more troubling. A deep dive into the Harris poll shows him besting Biden by 5 points. DeSantis does so by 3. Good news for Trump? Not so fast. Biden is standing atop a wrecked economy, border, culture, schools, and public safety – underwater by 14 in his favorables. Yet, Trump only looks marginally better than a wholly discredited Biden. Among possible Republican challengers, Trump shares negative likeability numbers (-3) with Ted Cruz (-2) and Mike Pompeo (-4). DeSantis beams brightly, up by 13 in the sunny uplands of likeability. Amazingly, Republicans in the poll still favored the one with the higher negatives, and therefore with weaker prospects. At this juncture, they are poised to do to America what Arizona and Pennsylvania Republicans did to their states. Knowingly choosing weakness might be an additional definition of insanity.
It won’t require much donor cash from the Democrats’ cadre of billionaire smear merchants to remind people of Trump’s vulgarity. The guy daily confirms the worst about him: occasionally cavorting with the lunatic fringe and incessant recourse to worn out narcissisms.
He opens his mouth and middle-class suburbanites cringe. The schtick leaves only the diehards who revel in politics as performance art – “owning the libs”, “Trump being Trump”. Thus, the Trump following is starting to resemble Grateful Dead groupies: bellicose, aging, and regularly depleted by admissions to nursing homes and funeral parlors. Don’t look here for a winning coalition.
With Democrats professing affection for Marxist folly (in CRT, systemic oppression, the too-numerous …phobias, eat the rich), and resorting to Tammany Hall electoral tactics, one has to wonder about their grip on sanity, or honesty, or at least good sense.
Republicans are proving themselves to be no better. Shockingly, many, maybe a majority, have come to fondle crassness and crudity as some kind of winner. Combine those bestialities with inexperience and naivete in candidate choice and we end up with Democrats getting a Mulligan (second chance) to make more hash of our lives. Republicans don’t have a grip on the first rule of politics: first, you’ve got to win elections. Republicans hitching their wagon to Trump, and candidates like him, will only guarantee another wild ride over the cliff.
We can’t even discuss these matters sanely, intelligently. Our vocabulary is riddled with empty generalities. Mostly they are straw-man figures of hate. A good portion of the chattering classes on the right lambast the “establishment” and “RHINOS” without much definition beyond somebody who might have governing experienced and lacks a hair-trigger Defcon 3 personality. Democrats are straitjacketed by a paranoia about a fascist under every rug, “systemic” racism when you can’t find real racism, Gaia-worship in climate-change mania, and an ever-expanding list of “protective classes” in need of their paternalistic care . . . at our expense. Listening to Tucker Carlson or Matt Gaetz on the right is as shrill to the ears as Biden, MSNBC, or AOC on the left. If they aren’t insane, why do they talk like it?
Whew, woe be to the American republic at this degenerate phase in its life cycle. We appear to be so insane.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Trio of polls show Trump clawing back momentum from DeSantis”, Zachary Basu, Axios, 1/24/23, at https://www.axios.com/2023/01/24/trump-desantis-polls-2024-presidential-election
* Harvard-Harris Poll, January 18-19, 2024, at https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/HHP_Jan2023_KeyResults.pdf
* NYT skepticism of mail-in voting can be found in “It Takes a Superspreader to Know a Superspreader: Whether Sturgis, BLM, or voting by mail, the media chooses narrative over facts every time.”, Gerald Baker, Wall Street Journal, 9/14/2020, at https://www.wsj.com/articles/it-takes-a-superspreader-to-know-a-superspreader-11600097758
* Additionally, NYT’s skepticism can be found here: “Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises” at https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-by-mail-faulty-ballots-could-impact-elections.html
* The differences between modern progressives and their 19th century cousins can be found here: “Modern Vs. 19th-Century Progressives”, Jason Merchey, 11/22/2017, at https://valuesofthewise.com/modern-vs-19th-century-progressives/