If Trump Wins Should We Accept The Results?
What if we can demonstrate with little doubt that Russian interference turned the tide in the present election? Shouldn’t we admit that we are just learning to deal with elections at a time when social media facilitate worldwide interference in our political choices?
I hear people saying, “We are better than they are.” Will you still be saying that in eight years when “they” control your information and behavior?
Trump has not decreased the power of the government, he has been shifting it so that the heads of agencies and judges up and down the legal ranks are now his appointees. Machiavelli must be smiling. Just last week he has tied the hands of people in agencies who might try to protest or block his own orders. He wants the government to be a smoothly running machine-his machine.
Russians have stolen the personal information and political histories of thousands of voters, the better to target misinformation and threats to those who oppose Trump. And, yes, they know who you are who stand up to Trump on social media. Your opinions are open and available to all. Some of you who have been trolled with threats know this better than anyone.
I don’t mean just complaining if T wins. Or trying to go to Canada or France-they won’t let you in thanks to T’s spread of the virus.
I mean using all the power of the states and local governments to fight back against a Trump Party takeover of the levers of power. There is no more Republican Party, we are dealing with the new and awful Trump Party. Fighting back means using the full force of demonstrations and strikes-bigger, more intense than the BLM actions. Some people smile when they see women dressed as if they walked out of The Handmaid’s Tale, as if those outfits were overstated memes. They aren’t. There is no overstatement at all. Women will be punished for seeking their liberties. Our nation will be permanently divided and T’s forty percent base will slowly (or maybe quickly) top the fifty percent majority mark, driven by intimidation and opportunism.
No, I don’t want Trump to win, and at this point in the election it’s too early to say. We have not taken polls in pandemic times. Pollsters are falling over themselves to determine mathematically how polling errors made in 2016 can be prevented from recurring. And, yes, they are polling more white males without college education in PA and elsewhere. But 2016 and 2020 are not merely apples vs. oranges years, they are pine tree vs. submarines years. 2020 is the year of Covid estrangement, impoverishment, and confusion; of social media on steroids and on the meth of conspiracy theories; of local, state, and federal agencies strangled, twisted, and starved by T’s minions; of monstrous weather effects making us fear for life and property.
We are already talking about basic changes affecting our constitutional system-in defense of the Trump Party’s attacks on that very system: Expanding the Supreme Court and expanding the definition of human rights to legally protect racial equality, to health care for all, and for “war time” taxation to pay to stop global warming.
Elections determine how power is distributed. As we have all learned (and should have learned years ago), Presidential power has grown into the goliath of the government. Turning the Department of Justice, which is supposed to guarantee equal justice for all persons no matter their origins, color, or economic status, has been turned into a puppet of the president. A precedent has been set that from now on equal justice depends on the mood and loyalty of the Attorney General. And if the AG refuses to go along with the White House, he or she will be fired until an accommodating figurehead is found. Nixon did that when he pushed the growth of the power of the president and Trump has brought the destruction of the independence of agencies such as Justice to a new intensity never imagined, even by Nixon.
A great danger has been voting suppression. Television shows us long lines of early voters and communicates optimism about the fair counting of votes. I praise those who have suffered to vote early in person, but I am far from optimistic about the fair counting of voting. I remember well the presidential election of 2000, which was won by George Bush by the vote of one Supreme Court Justice who voted no on the question of whether there was time to set up an alternative system of counting in Florida.
Winston Churchill said that Democracy is the worst system of government except for all the others. With due respect for Churchill, that is a stupid statement. Democracy was invented, has been reformed in thousands of ways, and exists in hundreds of forms today. Each time we reform Democracy we change it, hopefully for the better.
But with regard to not accepting the results of what might be the most flawed election in history and flawed in ways we cannot yet fully understand, “not accepting” means demanding changes in the election system and even a do-over. It is time for people to be more than upset or angry; it is time for people to be furious.
It is time to come out of our Happy Days cocoon. From the end of World War II we were one of the most together, wealthiest, and open societies in the world. And then, the digital age and the dire straits of health care have cracked our divisions wide open. Happy Days are over. America is no longer “a city on a hill,” it is a floating island facing a tsunami of change.
We have to understand better where we are and focus our collective power to face the dominance of digital giants and insidious foreign opponents. We can’t do that if we are forced to deal with hate groups empowered by irrational leadership. And when-not if-the American economy goes south due to crazy fiscal and trade policies, there will be anger, confusion and violence in the nation to make our current status look like the years of the Buchanan presidency before the matches were put to the canons of the bloody Civil War.
If Trump wins, don’t settle for bunkering down and feeling sorry for yourself. Other countries have and do now face the challenge of deep change in their power arrangements. We must frankly discuss the dangers and the possibilities on the horizon.
