Why Vote?

As of now, I see no good reason to vote, especially if you live in one of those deep blue one-party states such as Chicago, California, the Acela Corridor, LA to Seattle, almost any metropolis, any burg with a 40,000-student college campus, or battleground state with Philadelphias crammed within it. What’s the point? The human capital to stay informed, tromping down to the polling place, or spending an hour filling out the thing is wasted when boxes of ballots are filled out by civic illiterates at the conniving of party activists or ballot harvesters reaping unused ballots and filling them out on the side of a van. Again, what’s the point in doing your duty only to have it canceled by the election equivalent of gangland enforcers?

I do have one caveat, though. It’s that the down ballot races, or maybe the mid-terms, retain some legitimacy because they lack a “Gone with the Wind” marquee status of the race for federal head honcho. Those races aren’t likely to attract the sinister gaze of our election system’s villains and therefore we benefit from their inattention. It’s like in a riot when one store is unexpectedly spared while the rest go up in flames. In such races, the pride in voting is replaced by the relief in knowing it will probably count because it won’t be aborted by the 3,000 empty ballots with the exception of one marked bubble next to one presidential candidate dropped in one heave at the registrar.

Undelivered Election Ballots Discarded on Arizona Farm, Nov. 4, 2020.

I was thinking today about the huge vote totals for both presidential candidates in this election. As of now, we have about 145 million ballots cast for president out of a US voting-age population of around 255 million. Of that number, about 169 million were registered to vote. Does each one of those 145 million represent one person above room temperature? Call me skeptical. The closer the vote percentage approaches the full mark, the greater the likelihood that many of those votes are reflecting the wishes of non-souls and the functionally illiterate. You can’t help but scrape more of the muck in the bottom of the pond as it is emptied.

The fix was in when people were allowed to vote a month early, sometimes after election day, and the spray of ballots across the country through the mail. In other words, the muck was thicker than usual this time around. And it ended up in the water supply.

Now the candidate that benefitted the most from this afterbirth of an election will have all the executive power to go COVID crazy. Get prepared, he’s going to go all Gretchen Whitmer on us. The Wuhan virus was used by power-hungry Democrats to destroy nearly everything in our public and private life. Authoritarianism is an addictive drug, and, once used, it will be easier the next time. Watch out every flu season for the mutilation of our social and economic life. Intoxicated with power, nothing will escape the gaze of our new Caesars. This virus, and any others that may befall us in the next four years, will be milked to essentially repeal the Constitution and turn an industrious people into a cowed and subservient one.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.

Our political ethos will not be spared. Supportive riots will be quietly approved through official silence as dissent against the rulers will be quashed. The right of association to protest will go out the window with the rest of the First Amendment. Forget about faith and fellowship. The equal protection of the laws will suffer a similar fate as children in chaotic homes won’t fare as well with Zoom education when compared to those well-heeled enough to form learning pods, tutors, and close parental supervision. It’s a social catastrophe. Watch other issues get thrown into the vortex such as gun control and AOC’s adolescent musings in her Green New Deal. COVID is robust enough for Schumer’s “change America”. This highly dubious election put the fox in the henhouse.

Let’s not look under that rock called the economy once these clowns get their hands around its neck. That important part of our lives involved with making a livelihood will be destroyed under the auspices of a hysteria about a vulnerable few, very few. The vulnerable should stay home and Biden’s efforts should focus on assisting and protecting them. A Sherman’s March through all of American life is a moral monstrosity and hardly justified, but we’re likely to get it anyway. That mound of pieces of paper said so.

One of the things that is lost on the civically illiterate – as they were made kicking and screaming to contribute to the rancid pile – is subtle and not so subtle distinctions. Biden and his crew wallow in a muddled fog between “experts” and policy-making. It works on the easily befuddled. In reality, experts provide advice; policy-making incorporates different points of view alongside an analysis of cost-benefit ramifications. For God’s sake, policy-making isn’t being led around by the nose by a select few “experts” who appeal to your authoritarian instincts. Different actions carry with them huge costs in a people’s social, economic, and political lives. Biden’s selected cabal of “experts” shouldn’t have the first and final say in what is to be done. There are too many in the class of “expert” who disagree. Plus, other experts in affected fields should have a say. That is what is meant by the art of statesmanship. Bringing all this together is the stuff of policy-making, not an act of waiting for Anthony Fauci to emerge from his lair like Punxsutawney Phil to issue his garbled pronouncements.

Punxsutawney Phil
Anthony Fauci

Collecting 50%+1 of these pieces of paper in enough states is just what the doctored ordered to resurrect the divine right of kings, or Rousseau’s “general will”, or Lenin’s “vanguard elite”, or whatever you want to call the emasculation of our citizen’s republic. After the Democrats mangled the vote by making the process a farce, there is little that the single citizen can do. It matters not if scant skullduggery can be proven. Follow your nose. You may not be able to identify the source of the stink in the pile, but that won’t stop it from stinking.

RogerG

Is an Election the Voice of the People?

South Floridians stood in long lines Sunday during the last day of early voting in Miami, Oct. 31, 2020. (photo: Alan Diaz/AP)

The direct answer to the question is “no”, but it’s what we’re stuck with. All the other governance choices are even more dangerously spurious. Autocracy, aristocracy, and oligarchy take the powers of a mob and put them in the hands of one or a few egos. Still, to admit that a broad franchise is the only remaining sensible option is a far cry from it filling the role of the holy grail. Our world is flawed and so are the people in it. All we can say with certainty after an election is that one candidate was first past the post, that one person got more of the little pieces of paper than the others. Any attempt to tease out of the result something more significant is a recourse to divination. You know, like trying to uncover the will of the gods from haruspicy (inspection of animal entrails) or ornithomancy (interpretation of bird actions).

This man in Rhumsiki, Cameroon, attempts to tell the future by interpreting the changes in position of various objects as caused by a freshwater crab through the practice of nggàm. Does he have better accuracy than our pollsters?

It looks like Biden is our president for the next four years. What does it mean? It’s simple: Biden got more of the little pieces of paper than the other guy. That’s it! It was just as true in 2016 as it is today.

The possible reasons for an electoral outcome are as numerous as the number of hair follicles on a silverback ape. Back in 2016, Trump got more of the slips in key states than Hillary, but was it mostly because a sufficient bulk of voters in those places didn’t like Hillary or was it due to love for the orange man? Was it an outrage vote against suffocating political correctness? Was it a rebellion of the middle of the income spectrum without college degrees? Was it a cry from flyover country? Was it an uprising against halfwit elites awash in money, influence, social status, and discreditable educations from Ivy League schools? Was it because the other side was simply caught off guard? Can’t say, but that won’t stop the crystal ball gazers at Fox News and the leftist cabal at MSNBC/CNN/NBC/CBS/ABC/WaPo/NYT/Newsweek/Time /Slate/Politico. There’s no shortage of seers (pundits, talking heads) when dollars-for-mouth is dangled before some with past or present clout. It’s a sweet gig if you can get it.

MSNBC host and former Bush-Cheney Communications Director Nicole Wallace speaks to John McCain 2008 campaign strategist Steve Schmidt.

2020 offered some intriguing results. Biden pulled out a squeaker. But how? Let’s start with a few things that are objectively true. First, we are in the midst of a virus-panic. The hysteria contorted nearly everything from livelihoods to educating the young to Thanksgiving to elections to romance. How can anyone get a date while marring the face with the look of a bank robber? It’s hard to even get started with a stranger when eyes meet but the rest is a mystery. As for the holidays, Thanksgiving and Christmas are to be relegated to computer screens. Ugh!

Back to elections, they were deformed by throwing caution to the wind, just what Democrats have been trying to achieve for decades. For them, many deep blue jurisdictions functioning as one-party states tossed ballots to every addressee on the voter rolls. Please, if you will, compare that to going to the old tried-and-true voting booth. The ballot is accounted from poll worker to voter to the secrecy of the booth to the observed placement of the ballot in the box in front of the poll worker. Surely, chicanery is still possible but it becomes viral in massive vote-by-mail schemes when ballots are thrown about like supermarket ads into mail boxes or on the ground next to them. The only real stopgap for integrity is the Boy Scout oath. Ugh!

Check out this scenario: party activist is alerted to the date of the mailing, is assigned a voter registrar list to visit addresses, helps persons answering the door to fill it out, assists them in getting a replacement if they threw the thing out with the supermarket ads, helps those delinquents in filling it out, and reaps the ballots from any leftovers, and all the while getting paid for it. Some of this is illegal, but how can you prove it? It all happened before anyone was alerted and ends up in the vote count. And then it’s off to the microphones after the things have been counted to admit the presence of fraud but claim it’s inconsequential. The reliance on the moral integrity of political activists is a sorry basis for an election system.

Secondly, all the pieces of paper are treated equal by the counters, as they should be. But are they in reality? Do they truly reflect an equal mental comportment for voting? Some people don’t care. Some people don’t care enough to devote the mental energy to be informed, or even vote if left to themselves. An election might be reduced to the success either side experiences in galvanizing the non-informed and uncaring. Under these auspices, an election is a race to collect pieces of paper from both sides’ dunces.

Where’s the buy-in on the part of voter? I don’t think it’s asking too much of the citizen to sacrifice a portion of their lunch hour to fulfill their chief civic responsibility. It says much about you if you’ll only do your duty if the ballot is delivered to you, someone helps you fill it out, get it to the registrar, or worse, bribes you into voting with holidays, free rides, and free lunches. Still, that vote from a blank slate has the same weight as the one from a person who understands that a ban on fracking will destroy their livelihoods and children’s future while doing nothing to mitigate “climate change”.

Democrats are the main instigators of a loosey-goosey election system. COVID gave them the prime opportunity to saddle us with choices of their multitudinous uncaring and ill-informed.

True, both sides have ample minions in the dunce category, but ample doesn’t mean equal. The Democrats seem to incorporate a bumper crop of dolts who are all-too-willing to believe in bunkum. The absurdities aren’t limited to the person who can’t break away from The View or the Ellen DeGeneres Show. Profound inanities proliferate from Democrat head honchos on down. The vagina-head protests at the time of Trump’s inauguration – a good sample of the D base – were populated with people who are now ecstatic about the head grifter of a family of grifters with a creepy personal history ascending to power. Pelosi, Biden, and the rest of the big cheeses are alright with sovietizing healthcare, as if bankrupting the nation will make it all better. The Green New Deal is Soviet central planning no matter how you shake it. The destruction of the livelihoods of millions will come at no change in Climate Change since the two biggest CO2 polluters don’t hone their policies to the wishes of the Sierra Club and are too ecstatic about leaving the stone age. The Dem’s bastardization of the confirmation process is now legendary after they tried to conduct a lynch party on Kavanaugh on the basis of nothing more than the baseless and raw accusation of single person, a person without evidence and littered with contradictions. The Senate hearing room and the mob in the street – the Democrat base in full view – were enflamed with the slander. Speaking of dunces, who else but a dunce could believe this bunk? The rabid D base could.

Women’s March, Washington, DC, Jan. 21, 2017.

And I haven’t mentioned the bilge that came to be known as “collusion” and an impeachment that was solely based on a singular phone call in the president’s exercise of foreign policy. A request for assistance in an American investigation on the grifting habits of the Biden family was turned into coup against the 2016 election. The manner in which the conversation made its way to the wolves in the Dem leadership in Congress speaks volumes. As it turns out, the “whistleblower” was an Obama leftover partisan hack in the bowels of the NSA. From there, the salivating wolves running Congress ran wild with impeachment at a time when a dangerous virus was insinuating itself into the country.

Collusion like impeachment was pure hooey, as Mueller had to reluctantly conclude. The only proven collusion turned out to be an unwitting (or witting) kind between Hillary/DNC and a partisan zealot and a sometime Russian intelligence operative, which ended up in the form of a smear known as the “dossier”, and then to the wolf pack. Who could believe this stuff? Dunces could, especially if clouded by untrammeled hatred and a lust for power. This disreputable cast of characters made up the “loyal opposition” in 2020. Biden was only a surfer riding the wave.

Robert Mueller testifies before the House Intelligence Committee, July 2019. (CSPAN)

Interestingly, Trump’s earlier request to the Ukrainian president unexpectedly gained additional legs in the week before this November election. By then, though, it was too little, too late. The scandal known as “early voting” – a month or earlier – became standard and the Dems exploited it to the hilt. The non-voting tendencies of their demographic base could be corrected by the mailed ballot and ballot harvesting. They already had millions in the bank before the good news about the vaccine, the recovering economy, and Tony Bobulinski’s revelations of Biden and his family’s time-honored tradition of peddling influence to become millionaires and maybe next door neighbors to the Obamas with a Martha’s Vineyard estate of their own. The party of big government is self-interested in it becoming bigger because it will make millionaires of them all. Grifting is a profession for this clan.

Joe Biden (middle), his son Hunter and his sister Valerie Biden Owens in 2016. Recent attacks on the former vice president pivot off the lucrative business activities of his son during the Obama administration. (photo: Visar Kryeziu/AP)

The picture of the 2020 election is more complicated than the elevation of an incontinent grifter to the presidency. The Republican down ballot did slightly better than the top of the ticket. The Republicans are in a stronger position to flood the zone with proposals to restore integrity to our elections. Voter ID, putting an end to early voting, reducing the prevalence of mail-in voting, establishing stronger federal standards in federal elections, and instituting criminal penalties for public officials who violate those official norms are some ideas that should make their way into bills. Let the Democrats play their “suppressing the vote” gambit. These measures poll well. Republicans, get on with it and make some hay.

With Republican successes down ballot, what is the “voice” of the people? Some voters believe this, some believe that, and some are just morons. The last category might be more numerous because it includes the folks who believe in things that aren’t true. Progressivism and socialism are plagued with things that aren’t true. These two related worldviews have a head start in the fantasy department. How many voters are firmly entrenched in them? My guess is that there are many. So, the “voice” of the people is a cacophony with a healthy dollop of the farcical.

So much for elections.

RogerG

** Also on my Facebook page.

It’s More Than the Irregularities in Counting

Wayne County (Detroit) poll worker covers the windows after poll watchers were evicted on November 3, 2020.

Justice Alito ordered Pennsylvania election boards to segregate late-arriving ballots. The order is important to be sure, but there are two kinds of possible corruption in this virus paranoia-stoked election: misbehavior in the processing of the ballots and the abuse in the production of them. Alito’s order deals with the former.

Right now, we are in the processing phase and, rightly, much attention is focused on the much rumored, historical, and serious irregularities in Democrat one-party fiefdoms. Yet, let’s not forget the altered system that produced the ballots, delivered them, set the conditions for which they were marked, and played footsie with the deadlines for their arrival for processing. It’s the production side of the equation wherein lies the greatest difficulty to prove widespread criminal abuse, beyond what has been dismissed as just anecdote, but which naturally draws into question the legitimacy of elections. The biggest threat to our democracy (actually, citizen republic) is the Democrats’ long-held desire to conduct monkey business with the franchise.

The setup before the ballots get to the counters makes it possible for all the other suspicious activity in processing them. That setup was due to COVID, which was the expedient to turn our elections into a Third World affair. The virus has been exploited to mutilate our way of life. The COVID panic was used to repeal the First Amendment – unless you’re going to march in the streets for a neo-Marxist revolution, erase our history, loot, pillage, and burn – construct authoritarian regimes in the states, and dismantle livelihoods. The COVID scare was used to destroy the education of our children, social life, and our self-concept as we move about disguised in masks. Children will grow up knowing people only from the cheek bones up. Now the ginned-up madness has tainted the foundational element of a citizen republic, the vote. Among those other things, COVID became the pretext to construct a Rube Goldberg election system; one mostly designed by Democrats to cook up Democrat victories.

Election challengers watch poll workers count absentee ballots for the city of Detroit, Nov. 3, 2020.

Are elections in the COVID and post-COVID era to be limited to rubber stamping Left/Democrat proclivities? The collectivism gang distorted our established ways while Republicans tried to put a break on Democrat designs with ballot integrity measures, to no avail in the era of the COVID panic-as-excuse. The Democrat dream of expanding the franchise to include the living and the dead, the non-citizen and citizen, the uninterested and grossly ill- or non-informed, and the ineligible and eligible was made real.

In many states, particularly blue ones, ballots were sent hither and yon by mail using voter rolls dirtied with many who cannot legally vote and those who would not if left alone. Where did the ballots go? They went to an address to then be marked by God-knows-who. A kind of cattle roundup in the form of ballot harvesting was authorized by the usual suspects to milk every last vote out of the uninterested, ill- or non-informed, living or dead, and ineligible and eligible.

Ballot harvesting.

What was happening behind the closed doors of those addresses? Who and how were the ballots filled out? I don’t know, you don’t know, they don’t know, which now elicits healthy suspicions that the entire process is a sham.

Then deadlines became meaningless, all in order to keep the ballot boxes open so they could be later stuffed to produce the Democrats’ preferred result. Another healthy suspicion. This jerry-rigged system encourages such misgivings. Is this what is meant by the risible chant “count very vote”? Pardon me, after this contrived and mockery of a system, for having my doubts about the results. Reagan said it best, “Trust but verify”. He said it in reference to the Soviet general secretary; many of us are saying it to the people of a party with many similar beliefs.

If Trump loses, nonetheless, Trump will have pulled the makeshift bandage off a fetid wound. He brought out of the interstices all the harmful bacteria that are present in the open wound of our modern politics and system of government. Thanks to a dossier, Mueller, and a coup that was disguised as impeachment, we now know of the existence of the dark influence of a new, pernicious, and burgeoning social class: an American nomenklatura. Sometimes referred to as the deep state, it’s an interweaved and integrated social class of government-associated non-profits and government workers, both appointed from the world of DC and ensconced in the civil service.

The nomenklatura

They have allies in the culture in the Democratic Party, Big Media, corporate boardrooms, the uber-rich, people with haute couture pedigrees and pseudo-prestigious degrees from our campuses-turned-indoctrination centers. It’s a vile socio-political ecosystem that Trump has exposed by his presence and persona.

Out of this milieu came the 2020 election. Biden is the quintessential creature of it. He might ride into office on a river of this socio-political slime. These next four years might be very interesting ones.

RogerG

** Also on my Facebook page.

What’s Next?

Supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump bang on the glass and chant slogans outside the room where absentee ballots for the 2020 general election are being counted at TCF Center on November 4, 2020 in Detroit, Michigan. (Photo: Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images)

If Biden wins, he will earn the rap “Your Fraudulency”. The virus has given us more than 200,000 dead. It’s now the go-to excuse for conducting an election that appears to be eerily reminiscent of those in a post-Soviet republic. Massive mail-in voting is, on its face, highly dubious. The blanketing of many urban-dominated states (overwhelmingly blue) with mail-in ballots is an invitation to fraud in states with a history of it. Accounts are trickling in of the dead voting and out-of-staters and non-citizens mysteriously showing up in the vote count. Poll watchers were evicted from the counting (see below), something stipulated in law, ostensibly due to COVID-induced paranoia about “overcrowding”.

And the post-election vote counts in these deep blue, historically corrupt Democrat one-party jurisdictions all blows one way: to the D’s. As they say in politico-speak, the “optics” aren’t good, and neither is the legitimacy. Will Biden be declared the winner by a rankly partisan media, and truly accepted by the public, in an election with as many credibility holes as a block of Swiss cheese?

What’s next for the aggrieved? Frankly, options are few. Potentially illegal votes will disappear like a rain drop in a pool. Segregating them will be impossible once they are counted. The wrangling over the 2000 election brought to light the realization that a do-over isn’t likely because the courts are as reluctant to get involved as a child is in eating his spinach.

Broward County canvassing board member Judge Robert Rosenberg looks over a questionable ballot at the Broward County Courthouse in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, November 24, 2000. (Photo by RHONA WISE / AFP)

The Constitution stipulates the process for choosing the president and leaves management of the election process to the states. If the state turns a blind eye to chicanery, there’s little recourse, especially if the process is as opaque as Trump initially wanted his wall to be.

Court challenges might have legs if the shenanigens clearly violate other Constitutional provisions, as in 2000 when the Gore team violated equal protection in trying to cherry-pick selected Florida counties for recounts. A case could be made here, but it’ll have to overcome extreme judicial hesitancy.

The state legislature could be called into session to block the caper in a legal action, but it will be late to the party and, as of this writing, there seems to be little life at the state capitol. No doubt, the Constitution establishes the state legislature as the election nanny. Still, it would be too little, too late.

Sadly, election fraud has proven to be the the most unenforced crime on the books. There are no finger prints and the smoking gun is so dispersed as to be unrecognizable, and the jury-rigged system of throwing ballots hither and yon in the mail invites suspicions. In response, the public may be limited to the Constitutional right of association. The election lacks legitimacy, so show up at Your Fraudulency’s inaugural in droves and express your disapproval.

Wearing his trademark aviator sunglasses, Vice President Joe Biden visits a mall in Las Vegas with senate candidate Catherine Cortez Masto. (AP Photo)

Don’t worry about being accused of mimicking the 2016 vagina-heads. They had no case. They just didn’t like the result. This one has the pungent stink of fraud all over it.

RogerG

** Also on my Facebook page.

Lessons of 2020

Mail-in ballots for the 2020 November election.

We are stuck in a rut. We are mired in a blockheaded assumption that there are few if any continuities in human experience. We are tacitly and openly told that we can make ourselves anew according to each passing era’s intellectual, cultural, and technological superficialities. After all, individuals, we are told, are blank slates to be inscribed with whatever lies about in a person’s social environment and/or can be pushed into the mind by media and the diktats of the schools. Therein lies the heart of progressivism, and its monstrous crusades to make people conform to fleeting fads of thought. The way is made wide open to endlessly fiddle with people and their personal arrangements, as in the silly-but-menacing Green New Deal.

WASHINGTON, DC – NOVEMBER 14: Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) (L) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) hold a news conference to introduce legislation to transform public housing as part of their Green New Deal proposal outside the U.S. Capitol November 14, 2019 in Washington, DC. The liberal legislators invited affordable housing advocates and climate change activists to join them for the announcement. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

As a high school American History teacher, an entire chapter in the textbook was devoted to the “living Constitution”. It’s the idea that condones the boundless busybody government so beloved by progressives and their intellectual cousins, the socialists. However, it’s a complete refutation of the common thread throughout time of the thing that resides in all of us: human nature. This generic quality is the primary and permanent thing in the wirings of Aristotle to Adams to your Sunday morning sermon. Today is a constant war against the sage wisdom of our cultural legacy.

Norma McCorvey (right) – the “Roe” in Roe v. Wade – and lawyer Gloria Allred in 1989. The SCOTUS decision in 1973 was classic “living Constitution”. (File Photo / The Associated Press))

The confrontation plays out in our elections. Elections are the means to an end for our progressive brethren. Instead of elections being a neutral process to gauge the voice of the people, they are seen by today’s progressives as something to be manipulated to achieve the desired end, and then they drag the rest of us into their ends-justifies-the-means hell. Herein lies their predisposition to cheat by flaunting and surreptitiously breaking the rules. The 2020 election elucidates this lesson, and many, many more. Here’s a few others.

First, as it seems now, the Republicans will never win a close election. The predilection of progressives to win at all costs leads to legal and illegal abuse of the vote. Massive mail-in voting is scandalous, period. The progressive resistance to the simplest measures to protect ballot integrity is shameful in the extreme. The system is tailor-made for cheating.

The amount of cheating is hard to determine at this point. But we do know what happens when the protections of a police force are pulled back. Look no further than Minneapolis, Seattle’s CHOP/CHAZ, Portland’s mean streets, New York City, Chicago, Kenosha, nearly anywhere a large concentration of people reside. What gets rewarded with no fear of consequence gets repeated. Ditto for election fraud when guarantees for election integrity are replaced by the equivalent of the Boy Scout oath as the sole stop for malevolence that lies in some hearts.

Protesters gather in front of a liquor store in flames near the Third Police Precinct on May 28, 2020 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, A police precinct in Minnesota went up in flames late on May 28. (Photo by KEREM YUCEL/AFP via Getty Images)

Second, stop early voting and tighten the qualifications for mail-in voting. Even in a pandemic, we must return to in-person balloting on a set day. Any mail-in ballots can only be allowed within a predetermined window of no more than 5 days before the election and certainly not after. Early voting means that a voter acts before all the information before the election has been presented. The Democrats were harvesting some ballots before the public got an inner glimpse into the seamy world of the Biden family. Some people may have voted for a man who might face impeachment and criminal prosecution.

Third, ad hominem and failure to articulate a policy rationale can be serious problems in a chief executive. Have I accurately described a significant part of the Trump persona? The approach may appeal to a fixed slice of the electorate but has little capacity to reach out beyond that cocoon. Results are definitely important but weren’t sufficient to overcome a wildly permissive election system and a portion of the public who couldn’t take the absence of a generous spirit. Much of this was baked into cake by Trump. It was euphemistically referred to as being Trumpy.

Being Trumpy for four years meant that he failed at expanding his base to compensate for the rabid opposition. Results were enough for some among the hesitant but an energized Left with its mobs, fellow travelers, and money – and there was much of that from the Left’s growing billionaire class – and those of the center-right who were put off by his manners made a solid mass of irreconcilables and an uphill climb. The virus was another one of those things that fell into a preexisting vortex. Trump is a two-edged sword of combativeness against the swamp and crudity. The persona has a niche audience.

Fourth, the Republican Party is now a working-class party. Nationalism, patriotism, economic growth, and opposition to the “woke” thought police are now the party’s watchwords. Our elites from the boardroom to the faculty lounge are lost, but it’s no great loss since they are numerically insignificant and already held in such great disrepute. The party must assiduously plow those demographic fields that knows no specific ethnic, race, or gender attribute.

Trump supporters at a campaign even in Fort Dodge, Iowa, November 12, 2015. (Photo: Scott Olson/Getty)

Fifth, the great divide in our politics is no longer liberal/conservative. The catalyst for what divides us is culture. We are two different peoples irreconcilably separated by fundamental beliefs and ways of life. More accurately, liberal/conservative has been supplanted by tradition/avant-garde. The geographic complexion of the dichotomy is rural/urban or city/countryside, an age-old split.

Traditional notions of family and faith are more readily and publicly defended outside the metropolis, boardroom, and faculty lounge. The traditions of self-reliance, personal responsibility, equal opportunity, grace, and fidelity have an appeal beyond the frivolous categories of race, ethnicity, or gender. Therein lies tradition’s appeal to certain demographic segments nationwide, but the bastion is in the countryside.

This last lesson on our current state of affairs is fraught with the most danger. Culture defines us. Assaults on it and its related livelihoods will elicit strong reactions. Many nations, including ours, have been through this before. It isn’t pretty, and frequently bloody.

As long as the city continues the movement to separate itself from the rest of the country – and, indeed, it’s the city with its avant-garde reflex that is the engine of the separation – the country will be on the cusp of a fight, both physical and rhetorical. Be prepared for dark times despite the empty calls for unity, empathy, and accommodation in the election’s aftermath. The reality on the ground and the machinations in our institutions won’t match the speechifying words. Are we truly irreconcilable? We’ll soon see.

RogerG

This Thing is Going to the Court(s) and Worse

USA. Erie. 3th November. Inside the Courthouse opening mailed votes.

“Beyond the margin of fraud” is a cliché but one more true today than ever. Let me be perfectly frank in saying that, in order to limit the “margin”, not every vote should count nor should every potential voter vote. It’s stupendously ridiculous to claim otherwise.

I am one with Andrew C. McCarthy on this in his piece on National Review online. The Supreme Court muddied the waters in a recent 4-4 vote in allowing the Pennsylvania Court to rewrite its election laws but SCOTUS ordered any affected ballots to be held in abeyance till a final determination. This election won’t stop in SCOTUS. Think of the whole range of state and federal courts that’ll have a say on this monstrous flub of an election before we can put “finis” on it. Even then, the final vote will have the lingering smell of a septic tank.

How did we get here? And no, you can’t blame the virus. We can lay fault with the fact that we have forgotten the sole purpose of elections: to register the voice of the people. But how do we know that the tally reflects the “voice”? We don’t, and that’s because of the Democratic Party harangues to “count every vote” while they engage in a full frontal assault on ballot integrity.

The virus has a role . . . as an excuse, a pretext for Castro-style plebiscites. Mail-in voting has always been scandalous since it destroys the secret ballot and no-one knows what happens behind the closed doors of an address. Now we’ve put the gambit on meth. Obstacles in attempts to match signatures, screams of horror against voter ID, and the demand to count everything no matter how mangled underscore the Democrats’ fixation on the need to pile up the pieces of paper as their route to power. At the end of the day, though, did we have an election or merely a greasy slide to power?

Where’s the “voice”? Is it the “voice” of the profoundly uninterested and ignorant? Is it the “voice” of ballot harvesters? Is it the “voice” of the ineligible? No doubt, invalid votes cancel valid ones. So, we have an election that will satisfy few and has a stink rising from it.

Thank you Democrats for ruining a once good thing. In your zeal for power, you’ll only have made your opponents apoplectic. This election will have produced two types of winners: the kind who won in spite of the fraud and those who won with it. For those who rode the current of pungent malfeasance to office, they could be rightly referred to as “your fraudulency”, with no more validity than that.

Will half the country accept a corrupted tally? I kind of doubt it. The Democrats are responsible for this sorry state of affairs. Here’s an interesting question: What happens when elections lose their integrity? Elections have often been referred to as peaceful revolutions. The peaceful part is only possible if they are popularly accepted as credible. If the process lacks credibility, forget about the “peaceful” kind. Opposition will be left with no recourse but the violent other type.

The Democrats are playing with fire and an end to civility.

RogerG

** Also on my Facebook page.

The Rule of Raw Majoritarianism

Empty envelopes of opened vote-by-mail ballots. (Jason Redmond / AFP via Getty Images)

** Note: This was written on the day of the Nov. 3 election.

On the eve of the American Revolution, the cantankerous John Adams wrote, “The only foundation of a free Constitution is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People, in a greater Measure, than they have it now, They may change their Rulers, and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty [sic].” Adams’s faith in virtue as the corrective for our personal failings and weaknesses was as sorely tested in his time as it is in ours. He warned his fellow countrymen of excursions into wistful utopianism like the kind that was engorging revolutionary France. He wrote that a proper political order was “an attempt to place Government upon the only Philosophy which can support it, the real constitution of human nature, not upon any wild Visions of its perfectibility [sic]”.

John Adams, 1788

Combine the two comments and you have a dire warning on the current state of affairs in our country. Virtue is in rapid decline alongside an unacknowledged acceptance of the utopianism of human perfectibility.

Giving momentum to these troubling trends is the ingestion of raw majoritarianism by one of the two great political parties, the Democratic Party. I cringe when I hear Pelosi, Schumer, the Squad, and any of the other notable lights who grab a microphone to announce their fealty to “protect our democracy”. Reporters and the public let it slip without comment. What do they mean by “democracy”? For them, it’s raw majoritarianism. Everything for them boils down to 50%+1 of the little pieces of paper crammed into ballot boxes, no matter their origin.

Democrats today can only see human betterment being achieved under the auspices of an expansive state. Irony of all ironies, Antifa – or Anti-fascists – are pro-fascist in their basic assumptions. They and their kissing cousins in the base and leadership of the Democratic Party would find little disagreement with Mussolini’s famous and pithy dictum, “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state” – if they only knew, which they don’t.

Mussolini’s Fascist Party headquarters in Rome, 1930.

Under cover of “civil rights” and their rank notions of equality – meaning equality of outcome – nothing will be allowed to escape the purview of the state. For them, gun ownership is highly suspect and placed under heightened state supervision. Bible-based Christianity and its adherents will be policed for their beliefs and practices. A form of mob intimidation will be unleashed on anyone not courting the ruling party’s line with the connivance of Big Tech and Big Media. The central planning of environmentalism will cover all economic and social activity, governing where we live and how we live. The state will entice more young people into extending their stay in educational mediocrity with “free” college – meaning the national debt and the taxpayer will be larded with the bill. Medicare for All, or whatever they end up calling it, will turn an industry into a branch of the federal government. The remaining rump of the healthcare private sector, if one is allowed to survive, will atrophy into nothingness and single-payer. The financial angle for the bread and circuses will be hiked tax rates and new tax schemes that reflect the poisonous gruel of identity politics. Those targeted with propping up the bloated edifice with ever-larger extractions from their earnings will gradually, if not immediately, flee for safer environs. Welcome to “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state” . . . and burgeoning Swiss and Barbados bank accounts.

The Democrats’ zeal for state-sponsored utopia will push the country into a way of life increasingly mediated by politics. The more the state does, the more is decided by politics. And politics, as it is deeply embedded in the Democrats’ brain stem, is a cacophony of avaricious interests and officially-endorsed grievance groups. Politics becomes the jockeying for the biggest slice of the federal budget among the Party’s litany of constituent groups. There is no market for much of anything, only orchestrated pressure campaigns, a growing army of influence peddlers, and crafty wheeling and dealing in the murky world of the revolving door of lobbyists, politicians, and bureaucrats. Disappearing from the public square is personal volition in the provision and consumption of goods and services as more and more of life is opaquely triaged through DC politics.

All the Democrats need is the sanction of 50%+1 of those pieces of paper crammed into ballot boxes, no matter their origin. After the initial electoral success, they’ll move to permanently warp our Constitutional order to the benefit of their urban political machines which will give them a lock on power for decades. A toothless Supreme Court after court packing, the permanent addition of 4 new Democrat senators, the impotence of the Congressional minority after the euthanization of the filibuster, and the neutering of the Electoral College by extra-Constitutional means does the trick without having to deal with those “bitter clingers” and “deplorables” between the coasts and outside the cities. The question is, can this be done before any blowback in the next midterms? My guess: maybe not all, but much permanent damage will have been accomplished.

So, suburban moms don’t like Trump and in so doing may tilt the electorate into choosing the release into the henhouse of the wolves of socialism and perpetual metropolitan rule. I suppose this is what you get when raw majoritarianism is the arbiter of all matters public and private.

Good luck America.

RogerG

** Also on my Facebook page.

I am Worried for My Country

U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., speaks as, from left, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass. – The Squad – listen during a news conference last year. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Public discourse in the public square is dead and sensible deliberation in our institutions is gone. Increasingly our thoughts and speech are hyperbolic. Dramatic audio-visuals in the form of net-connected material such as podcasts and the full range of social media have replaced quiet contemplation and scholarship. Since the schools are mostly absent at the switch, people have little to rely on to mediate what they’re seeing and hearing. And when a extremist ideology comes to dominate one of our major parties, we have all the makings for a catastrophic rift.

See below.

Cultural antecedents are at the root. These antecedents differ by geography. Tradition has a higher survival rate outside the big cities, corporate boardrooms, big media centers, and the classroom. Inside those nuclei, it’s a worldview wedded to hedonistic collectivism. It’s not that metropolitan elites, and those who aspire to be, are hedonists. Their life pattern is typically traditional in marriage and family formation; but it’s what’s in their heads that makes all the difference: hedonistic collectivism. They near-homogenously vote that way. Meaning, they vote left.

The Democratic Party has become the epicenter of this urban belief system. As such, the Party has moved radically left and is essentially an urban phenomena. The belief system is baked in the cake of urban politics, and, by the way, is disseminated to the kids everywhere, but particularly to those in the inter-connected, cell phone world of exurbia-to-core. What we have is an isolated Party that has moved so far left that an uber-liberal like Pelosi is now mainstream. This is not a Party conducive to Truman or JFK any longer.

The Republican Party is essentially where it was since Calvin Coolidge, with only slight deviations. This is expected of a Party more compatible with our philosophical legacy. Key is the understanding of fixed standards going back to the ancient nexus of Jerusalem-Athens.

Therefore, the current political battle lines are Jerusalem-Athens vs. hedonistic collectivism. In Constitution-speak, it’s the real Constitution vs. a “living” one. In the hands of the Left, the rule of law becomes the rule of men but sold as the rule of law.

So, the rift isn’t due to a movement of both parties from each other. It’s a product of the big shift of the Democratic Party to the left, which means a fuller embrace of hedonistic collectivism. Combined with their political throw weight in densely packed urban areas, they can, if they marshal their critical masses, outvote everywhere else. Thus, their worldview has the potential to be imposed throughout the land. 2020 offers their best chance ever.

Is the rest of the country ready for the central planning of The Green New Deal (even if modified), centralized and massive gun registration and confiscation, invasions into the pulpit to force alignment with the left’s ethos, carte-blanche to abortion, toothless law enforcement, promiscuous nationwide lockdowns, forced acceptance of transgenderism in all manner of social interaction, the ongoing seeding of leftist ideology in the schools, and the radical restructuring of our Constitutional order to permanently empower the cities and their political machines? I don’t know, but we might be getting ready to have a taste.

My guess is that the rest of the country won’t sit idly by. They won’t wait for the next Congressional bi-elections to right the ship. Anyway, Congress has allowed itself to be turned into a glorified debating society as executive powers have filled the void. Obama proved that you don’t need legislation when you’ve got your phone and pen. An urban-dominated federal government will have tradition-minded areas up against a wall with no escape. The only recourse for those traditionally minded will be extensive civil disobedience and resistance – sadly, some of it will be armed. When you back a person into a corner, things go badly and quickly.

As a teacher in the public schools, I’ve seen this many times. Buckle up for a wild ride. It won’t matter if a new Biden administration and a Democrat-controlled Congress appear to modify their rough edges and compromise. You have to remember that it’s a compromise from the position of the radical left, democrat-socialists in power. In the end, the system still moves left, just at a slightly slower pace – especially after they rigged the system of government through court-packing, defanging the minority after the loss of the filibuster, made the Electoral College an irrelevancy, and cowed the Supreme Court with vicious attacks.

Sanctuary cities point the way in showing that a resistance can thumb their noses at a clear federal authority and get away with it. Likewise, traditionally-minded areas could just as easily follow the same script. Only in this case, these people are more likely to believe in the private ownership of firearms and the real purpose of the 2nd Amendment as a hedge against tyrannical government.

I’m not endorsing this possible outcome. I’m forecasting it. I hope, I hope that I’m wrong.

The outcome of the federal assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Tx., 1993. Our current flashpoints for violence will occur with groups already sensitive to federal government impositions.

RogerG

** Also on my Facebook page.

The Great Deception

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden speaks in Tampa, Florida on September 15, 2020 during a roundtable discussion with Tampa-area veterans and military families. (Photo by JIM WATSON / AFP)

First, let’s stop referring to “election night” on Nov. 3. It’s actually election month or . . . longer, thanks to the COVID craziness and the Democrats’ success in turning our election system into Silly Putty. It’ll be Christmas for lawyers.

If in the end the flamboyant circus mimics the current polls, the American people will get more, much more, than Trump moving out of the White House. They will get Venezuela: Trump out and Maduro clones in. The electorate can’t say that they didn’t vote for the clones. Of course, they voted for the socialists. Not voting for the antidote means the stampede of the toxin. Simple. Sooner than they might wish, they will experience the toxin, socialism.

Socialism offers what no society can deliver: free stuff for everyone all the time. The whole schema is made possible only by deception. Trump’s “The Art of the Deal” is the Democrats’ “The Art of Deception” in their campaign for things that aren’t true. Let me count the ways.

Take tax cuts. Democrats don’t like them. Being socialists-without-the-label, they have a near-genetic tic to spasmodically attack the rich in grasping lurches to seize assets; though, they must admit that there’s simply not enough there to fund their laundry list of inanities. That $400,000 DMZ for their beloved tax hikes is horse feathers. There isn’t enough above that DMZ either. And so, capital flees, and we get to relearn the old fact that capital flight is job flight, and another generation living in their parent’s basement way past their prime.

Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

The Republican tax cuts of late 2017, and Paul Ryan’s and Mitch McConnell’s congressional vetoes of some of the worst of Obama’s 8-year regulation spree, boosted the economy out of Obama-slumber. Now we might vote ourselves back into the induced coma. The Democrats will hide any of this from adult reasoning because they might be exposed for actually believing in this batty stuff. There are few things more dangerous than the deadly true believer. The problem is, we might learn sometime after Nov. 3 that we turned over the gavel to a bunch of them.

Take the COVID panic that never ceases. This one’s easy. Everyone makes mistakes when you don’t know, and can’t know till later. Take the prima donnas of the donkey party. The top Democrat foghorns were boosting tourism and brandishing the xenophobia canard like a drunk loosens his bank account on the Vegas strip as the virus was slipping into US ports. Their attacks don’t offer anything new but the worst of what had already been tried, and without end. This line of gibberish is the rhetorical equivalent of pond scum. It’s a crime to logic. But don’t expect the party head honchos to let you in on the dirty little secret.

People wait in line as a food bank hands out 1,600 food bags at a pop-up pantry in San Francisco, Calif.ornia, on April 20 amid historic work furloughs and layoffs caused by the coronavirus pandemic. (Scott Strazzante/The San Francisco Chronicle)

Oh, and then there’s The Green New Deal. Now here’s a bad high school science term paper that was heralded as a serious idea by a college graduate who shouldn’t have graduated who happened to get into Congress from a district that would sooner vote for Fidel Castro than a Republican. Got it? Well, we should know where this is headed. Blowing up the US economy based on the giddy mental burps of a group plagued by an absence of mature discernment won’t end well.

The whole idea is preposterous. Dynamiting a lusty portion of the US economy, promising a gargantuan federal jobs program that past experience has shown won’t work, the Sovietizing of the US economy under central planning, and the resultant shrinkage of our economy, will drag down millions.

Look into what happened to the California north coast after the expansion of the protected lands for redwoods in the 1990’s. The lumber mills evaporated. Go, look at the meteoric rise in those counties of welfare participation and every other social pathology that would presage the meth-addled existence in the decaying hulk of the old rust belt. At that time, the easy-out for Clinton and the gang was re-training for tourism, like today’s re-training for coding. It’s the same old song, and with the same old results.

Again, don’t expect the Democrats to come clean. They hide behind the rhetorical legerdemain of “we’ll phase it out” (Biden) or “managed decline” (Newsom). It’s all meant to make you feel good about them destroying your livelihoods. It’s all meant to have them avoid the use of the word “kill” – as in kill fracking or kill fossil fuels. Even the flighty-headed representative from NY’s 14th congressional district wants a “phase ” out. It’s all word games with your future in the chopping block.

New York’s 14th Congressional District representative, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

And then there’s the line of attack on Republicans for having the temerity to repeal Obamacare’s colossal boondoggle. Remember the lost insurance plans, the lost doctors, many states relegated to one plan on Obamacare’s exchanges, skyrocketing rates because of mandated coverages so that, for example, men must pay for pap smears, the $250 penalty for refusing to buy what Obama and his crew cooked up, and the creation of a panel of unaccountable czars to pass judgment on the medical futures of seniors?

Into the current maelstrom come the millions of dollars of ads accusing Republicans of threatening the coverage for preexisting conditions. The interesting fact is, the repeal would still allow those policies and grandfather existing ones. All repeal proposals of which I am aware guarantee protections for those people with preexisting conditions. Trump repeatedly stated that he wouldn’t accept any repeal and replacement without it.

So, on what is the assault based? Nothing! They need scary stories to get people to vote for them. Just shower enough money on the lie and it magically becomes true.

A photo of discarded ballots taken the weekend of May 9, 2020 in Las Vegas, NV. Want to vote . . . 11 times? (Photo: Las Vegas Review-Journal)

I’m not sure any of this will matter. 50 million (maybe more?) have already voted by mail. We’ve just experienced the end of ballot integrity, the secret ballot, and new openings for enterprising miscreants in a growing black market for votes. We are well on our way to the sunset of public deliberation and rational discourse. It’s all about power, no matter what. We’ve found a new way to join the ranks of Venezuela. We choose it.

It’s so despicable.

RogerG

On the Electoral College

While reading Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson by Gordon S. Wood, I came across a conundrum that pervaded the thinking in the Revolutionary era. Namely, how do you distinguish a constitution from normal legislation? The British blurred the distinction by encompassing legislative acts into their conception of a constitution according to Blackstone and Paley in the 17th and 18th centuries. For them, a constitution included institutions, customs, and legislative acts. The colonists, different in their origins as a political entity, inhabited places that were founded upon colonial charters to establish their political order. From this, they got their view of a foundational document as special, something remarkably different from the normal legislative acts that arise out of a legislative body. To base their governments on something commanding allegiance without reliance on the crown and Parliament, they embraced the idea that constitutions were exceptional and could only command authority if approved and amended in an exceptional manner, such as special conventions requiring super-majorities. This is the origins of our Constitution and its supremacy clause, approval process, and amendment procedures.

The exceptional nature of constitutions coincided with the broad view of those present at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 regarding a national chief executive. He was to be an exceptional national personage with a broader basis of legitimacy than the simple majorities to pass bills as in the popularly-elected colonial assemblies. If the chief executive were chosen in like manner, by a popular vote majority, he wouldn’t command the same level of respect that would be expected of a truly national figure with truly national responsibilities.

Under Democrat demands to effectively dismantle the Electoral College, he would come to be seen as reflective of the areas that gave him his majority, which would be limited to a few populous states or highly concentrated urban locales. Areas not supportive would begin to see him as a foreign potentate. Instead of a constitution cementing the country into a “more perfect union”, the popularly-elected president would join the popularly-elected Congress in reshaping the courts to fit the impulsive and ephemeral majorities of the other two branches. Thus, the entire system of government would be seen as rigged against states and areas who would be effectively neutered, which would sow the seeds of rebellion.

Civil war is the probable result of Democrats’ efforts to transplant national power to their one-party fiefdoms. The Democrats are reckless and not deserving of the power if they choose to alienate most of the country. The Founders mean nothing to them, and wisdom to them is limited to their peculiar vision of the world. Everyone else – traditionalists mostly – will quickly come to realize that they are to be perennially excluded.

What’s the incentive of the excluded to remain in a union that was refashioned to fit a narrowly focused demographic with narrowly focused biases? Lincoln’s correct view of the union as inseparable, except under the same extraordinary measures that produced the Constitution, will be contradicted by the new facts on the ground that arise from a political order tailored to the self-interests of one party firmly entrenched in a few states and urban nodes.

Photograph shows a crowd celebrating the victory of the first battle of Manassas at the Confederate capitol in Richmond, Va., 1861. Photograph was taken by D.H. Anderson. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

The South was dreadfully wrong in the mid-19th century, but what of modern would-be separatists representing vast stretches between the coasts and outside the inner-cities? The South shamefully defended the hideousness of slavery and mistakenly thought that the acts of state assemblies were sufficient to dissolve the union. But what to make of Democrats using their control of the machinery of the national government to reshape the federal government to their permanent advantage and cutting out flyover country? It matters not if an election gave them majorities to manipulate the levers of government to erode the cement for a “more perfect union”. There are some things that are simply unwise and a popular-vote majority in one election can only paper over the foolishness.

Hiding behind the Democrats’ aggrandizement of power is the necessity for jack-booted power against any opposition that will arise. And opposition will flare up, and sadly some of it will be armed, because opponents will be left with no other option, their sovereign voice having been muzzled.

The Democrats are playing with fire. Does the public understand this? I don’t know. I kind of doubt it.

RogerG

** Also on my Facebook page.