Source: Economist John Kenneth Galbraith (2001). “The Essential Galbraith”, p.186, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
To me, this quote sums up what’s happening with the November 2024 elections, and the takeover of American politics by the frankly pro-dictatorship anti-democratic MAGA forces.
The first rotten door is the Republican party. At the state level, for at least the past decade, they’ve been doing their best to bias and taint the process of elections. How many Republican-held states have had their redistricting maps subject to court challenges now, for their flagrant bias? How many have succeeded anyway? Once you get to the point where the electoral map is grossly at odds with the popular vote, doesn’t that remove the main rationale for defending the American system of free and fair elections? Why defend election integrity, if the elections are rigged. Legally rigged is still rigged.
It’s just icing on the cake to lard the elections process itself with nuts who a) refuse to certify elections, just because, and b) think that (e.g.) hand-counted paper ballots are the only accurate way to vote. As long as they are suitably bamboo-free. Not to mention just plain making up and circulating lies about mass vote fraud. Have we all forgotten the Arizona Republican Cyber Ninja vote recount circus? They found no bamboo fibers. Instead, they found that the official count was accurate. Yet that zoo then required trashing all the (now-) compromised voting machines that the nuts got their hands on.
So, one entire side of our political spectrum is not merely no help in maintaining democracy in America. They’re actively seeking to get rid of it. For the simple reason that if the popular vote determined elections, they’d lose in a lot of places that they now win.
Then there’s Biden. His objective performance as President, so far, has been pretty good. But he can’t seem to get it through his head that it doesn’t matter whether or not he has been and remains competent to be President. What matters is how the electorate perceives him, and for the better part of a year, it’s been clear that the electorate (of all persuasions) perceives him as being too f**king old. See last post.
But if he steps aside, by tradition, the presumptive Democratic candidate would be Harris. However much many Democrats lust after having the first woman President, a) you’d think they’d have learned something after the Clinton debacle, which is what got us into this current pro-dictatorship MAGA mess, and b) my guess is that a woman of color has zero chance at winning the Presidency with our current electorate. (I’d have no problem voting for Harris, versus Trump, but I perceive that enough people would, to prevent her election.) And yet, rejecting her as the candidate, despite her doing her time as VP (just as Biden did, in his time), that’s surely going to alienate some non-negligible portion of people who might otherwise vote Democratic.
Damned if he doesn’t drop out. Damned if he does. That’s how I see it, at the moment. Don’t think that’s going to change, even if a third candidate is chosen by a fair process at the Democratic national convention.
Then there’s the justice system. We have a Supreme Court for whom ideology trumps reason or precedent, and who has fallen right into line with the basic MAGA precept of just tearing stuff up, with no plan for what happens next. Again, it’s just a bonus that they’re bending over backwards to shield Trump from prosecution by any means possible. That, to the point of formally placing the President above U.S criminal law by, among other things, excluding any of the President’s interactions with duly-appointed officials in his administration from being used as evidence of law-breaking.
As icing on the cake, the same folks who gave you that ruling have now declared that a payment, to a government official, as a reward for getting a desired action from that official, is no longer an illegal bribe under Federal law, if the payment occurs after the official’s action. Then it’s a tip — a gratuity. Which, if found to be an illegal gratuity, under a separate Federal statute, would incur far less harsh maximum penalties than an act prosecuted as bribery. All of which pretty clearly suggests that as long as you’re smart enough to agree to make the payoff after the decision, I think the Supreme court just declared open season on bribing state and local officials. At least as far as Federal law is concerned.
For the particular case in question, it was a city mayor who had awarded a firm a contract with his city worth $1M, who then asked for and received a $13K check from that company. (Reference: The Guardian). The Feds prosecuted the guy under the Federal bribery statute. The Supreme Court slapped down the Feds for doing that, with the apparent reasoning, based on carefully parsing this and other Federal anti-corruption statutes, a payment after-the-fact is a gratuity, not a bribe.
The upshot is that it’s perfectly fine to give expensive gifts to Supreme Court Justices state and local officials who give you decisions that you like, as long as you’re sufficiently coy about it, and can agree to make the payment after-the-fact, for any particularly favorable decisions.
As a person not in a position to bribe public officials to get what I want, that decision doesn’t make me feel better. This reference provides a good write-up of the facts.
I can’t make up stuff like that. And just in time for the next Federal election. Because that’s a perfect time to muddy the waters as to what does and doesn’t constitute bribing a state or local government official.
Meanwhile, the lower courts are so glacially slow, and produce such wrist-slap penalties if there are any penalties at all, that any laws dealing with elections, or preserving core functions of democracy such as the peaceful transfer of power, have no effective enforcement. Jarndyce and Jarndyce, in the flesh.
And then there’s internet-spread disinformation and other attempts to interfere with U.S. elections. From Russia, mostly (reference bipartisan report of the Senate Intelligence Committee) in past elections, but now from Russia, China, and who knows who else. Helped along by fellow-traveller Musk, and his control of (the company formerly known as) Twitter. And with huge dollops of domestic disinformation, again courtesy of what now passes for right-wing America. Served up to a Republican electorate who, as it turns out, is far more interested in stoking their anger and prejudice than in … anything remotely factual. See bamboo above. So, as Fox News executive correctly pointed out, if Fox doesn’t provide the lies that comfort those folks, somebody else will, and Fox will lose the profits gained from spreading those lies. All that, prior to losing a nearly-one-billion-dollar lawsuit, for knowingly spreading lies about voting machines, for the last election.
Finally, there’s the U.S. Southern Border. It matters not one bit that it has been rotten for decades. Both Reagan and Bush Jr. oversaw surges in illegal immigration that brought annual apprehensions (of folks trying to cross the Mexican border) to the 1.6M/year level. (Versus the peak of about 2.2M for Biden.) Both Republican Presidents made considerable hay over it, so at this point, it’s a tradition. The U.S.-Mexican border has always been porous in both directions. More than a third of the border is already guarded by walls and fences. The Congress is currently spending about $2B a year building more. And yet, as far as the numbers show, attempts at illegal immigration across that border have continued unabated.
By now, it’s Republican tradition to make whatever political hay they can from it. The new twist is that, unlike either Regan or Bush Jr., the Republicans now both use it to political advantage, and take steps to prevent changes that might minimize the issue.
The upshot is that yes, I fear for American democracy at this juncture. It’s not that I think the MAGA-heads have any valid points. It’s that the status quo appears unable to defend itself with this much pressure on these fronts. The last defense of the republic now appears to be the good sense of the electorate. And that’s a slender reed, indeed.
