The Election Was, Actually, Rigged

Among the many ironies of the 2016 election was Trump’s insistence that if he were to lose (and evidently only then), it would be evidence that the election was rigged.

The truth, as numerous election officials pointed out, is that tampering with the vote at polling sites–the only sort of “rigging” Trump would understand– is virtually impossible. Vote suppression is far more common.

That said, the actual “rigging” of American elections is quite legal; in fact, it’s baked into the system. I’ve written extensively about some of the more egregious examples, especially gerrymandering. But partisan redistricting isn’t the only structural element frustrating expression of the popular will.

Almost lost in the coverage of the election’s stunning result was the fact that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. She lost in the Electoral College, a structural throwback to a different time that has increasingly distorted national elections and failed to reflect the will of the voters as expressed at the ballot box. This is the second time in 16 years that a candidate has won the popular vote only to lose the Electoral College and the Presidency.

Many of the problems with the Electoral College are widely recognized: the outsized influence it gives swing states, the lack of an incentive to vote if you favor the minority party in a winner-take-all state dominated by the other party, and the over-representation of rural and less populated states.

Whatever the original merits of the Electoral College, it operates today to disadvantage urban voters in favor of rural ones. Hillary Clinton’s voters were women, minorities, and educated Whites, and they were disproportionately urban; Trump supporters were primarily less-educated White Christian males, and they were overwhelmingly rural.

In today’s America, cities are growing and rural areas declining. That decline undoubtedly feeds much of the anger and white nationalism displayed by Trump voters. One can be sympathetic to rural concerns without, however, giving the votes of rural inhabitants (already favored by gerrymandering) greater weight than the votes of urban Americans.

In Baker v. Carr, the Supreme Court famously upheld the principle of “one person, one vote.” The operation of the Electoral College violates that fundamental democratic tenet.

The cost of living is higher in cities, and most of us who choose urban life are willing to pay a premium in return for the benefits offered by more cosmopolitan environments. But a reduction in the value of our vote shouldn’t be one of the added costs we incur.

It is time to get rid of the Electoral College.

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What Can One Person Do?

Early Wednesday morning, I got a call from my 14-year-old grandson. He wanted reassurance that there are limits to what Trump can do, that “checks and balances” will contain him. He wanted to know what I thought would happen now.

He wanted to know just how frightened he should be.

My grandson is a freshman at an excellent high school in downtown Indianapolis. Before high school, he went to a magnet school, also downtown. His friends include African-Americans, Latinos and Muslims. Some of his classmates’ families immigrated to the United States. He is Jewish. During this ugly, divisive campaign they’ve all heard what will happen to “their kind” when Trump is President.

So many parents asked the principal of his high school what they should tell their children about these threats that she sent out an article from the Huffington Post, addressing that question.

Tell them, first, that we will protect them. Tell them that we have democratic processes in the U.S. that make it impossible for one mean person to do too much damage. Tell them that we will protect those democratic processes ― and we will use them ― so that Trump is unable to act on many of the false promises he made during his campaign.

Tell them, second, that you will honor the outcome of the election, but that you will fight bigotry. Tell them bigotry is not a democratic value, and that it will not be tolerated at your school.

I encourage those of you with children and grandchildren to read the entire article. But all of us who value fundamental American values of inclusion and equality–whether we are young or old, whether we have children or not, whether we are part of a minority group or as WASPy as they come–must resist the urge to “go along” with Trump’s efforts to undermine those values.

Many years ago, there was a television mini-series about the Holocaust that my mother and I watched with my children. After one episode, my mother said –with great conviction– that, had she been a German, she would never have gone along with the Nazis, that she would never have participated or stood by silently.

As I told her at the time, I wish I could be so sure of how I would have behaved. It’s one thing to sit on a couch in a free country and speculate on your response to a situation you don’t face, but when fascism (or any sort of authoritarianism) begins, it’s deceptively easy to convince yourself that this is just a “hiccup”–that really bad things aren’t happening, that the “other guy” would have been as bad or worse.

It’s so tempting to close your eyes to injustices aimed at other people. After all, we have lives to live, errands to run, houses to clean, offices to go to. How many of us would really, actively resist fascist measures that didn’t immediately or directly threaten us or our families?

It appears we are going to get the chance to answer that question.

In the wake of this horrific election and what a Trump Administration portends, every person of good will must resolve right now to be one of the “good Germans,” to be like the people who didn’t go along, who didn’t close their eyes, who didn’t make excuses for the early scapegoating, nativism and bigotry that ultimately enabled genocide.

This is a test. I can only hope we studied for it.

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It Seems We Aren’t So “Exceptional” After All

The election is over, but the racial and cultural resentments that led to the election of  Donald Trump are not over, and the incalculable damage he will do to America and the world is just beginning. Unfortunately, when the largely rural and less-educated population that voted for him realizes that he cannot deliver on his fanciful and frequently unconstitutional promises, they are likely to blame it on all the “others” they already resent–immigrants, Jews, Muslims, African-Americans. Uppity women.

Several people have compared this election to England’s Brexit, and there are obvious parallels (including, I’ll predict, significant levels of “buyer’s remorse.”)Nativism and white nationalism, not economics, motivated both votes.

A recent essay by Zach Beauchamp in Vox makes a pretty convincing case that–much as we like to believe America is somehow different from other Western democracies, as much as we pride ourselves on our “exceptionalism”–what we are seeing here is not that different from the nativist movements currently challenging European democracies.

It’s tempting to think of Trump as something uniquely American, but the truth is that his rise is being repeated throughout the Western world, where far-right populists are rising in the polls.

In Hungary, the increasingly authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, has started building a wall to keep out immigrants and holding migrants in detention camps where guards have been filmed flinging food at them as if they were zoo animals. In Italy, the anti-immigrant Northern League, led by a politician who has attacked the pope for calling for dialogue with Muslims, is polling at more than three times its 2013 level, making it the country’s third most popular party. And in Finland, the Finns Party — which wants to dramatically slash immigration numbers and keep out many non-Europeans — is part of the government. Its leader, Timo Soini, is the country’s foreign minister.

These politicians share Trump’s populist contempt for the traditional political elite. They share his authoritarian views on crime and justice. But most importantly, they share his xenophobia: They despise immigrants, vowing to close the borders to refugees and economic migrants alike, and are open in their belief that Muslims are inherently dangerous.

Beauchamp dismisses the notion that this wave of anti-immigrant activism is rooted in economics or even rejection of globalization. In his analysis, what is driving this is something far more primal: fear of difference and social change.

A vast universe of academic research suggests the real sources of the far-right’s appeal are anger over immigration and a toxic mix of racial and religious intolerance.

Beauchamp cites research done by Roger Peterson, who wanted to understand why social change led to attacks on minorities in some situations, but not others. Peterson argued that in order to understand what triggers ethnic violence, we need to understand and appreciate the role of resentment, which he defined as “the feeling of injustice on the part of a privileged portion of society when it sees power slipping into the hands of a group that hadn’t previously held it.”

Peterson concluded that a major cause of ethnic violence was change in the legal and political status of majority and minority ethnic groups, change that is met with a sense of injustice, because members of dominant groups believe they deserve to be dominant, and deeply resent it when members of other groups advance their status or pose a challenge to their pre-eminent positions.

During the 2016 campaign, that resentment–against minorities, against immigrants, and especially against women–was repeatedly found to be a more reliable predictor of support for Donald Trump than any other personal or economic characteristic.

It is that fury over social change that offers the best explanation we have for why the forces of intolerance are currently on the rise in the West. If we want to understand the world we live in today — and the one we’ll be inhabiting for years to come — we need to understand how immigration and intolerance are transforming the way white Christians vote. We need to understand that the battle between racist nationalism and liberal cosmopolitanism will be one of the defining ideological struggles of the 21st century. And we need to understand that Donald Trump is not an accident. He’s a harbinger.

People of good will have our work cut out for us.

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The Morning After

So much for the American experiment.

So much for the belief that in a marketplace of ideas, people would choose the better ones–or even be able to distinguish among ideas, propaganda and conspiracy theories.

So much for e pluribus unum and the lovely fantasy of a diverse citizenry coming together around a civic table.

However you characterize the deep cultural and educational divide that led to this place,  no one who actually understood what the government does and how it does it could  have voted to put a person like Trump in charge of it.

Last night, a lot of us lost the country we thought we lived in, the country we wanted to hand down to our children and grandchildren. What happens now is anyone’s guess, but one thing is sure–it will be very ugly.

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How Did We Get Here and Where Do We Go Now?

This semester, I am teaching an elective course that I “invented” some years ago; it is called “Individual Rights and the Common Good,” and the readings and class discussions center on the proper role of the state, and the optimal balance between respect for individual autonomy and the needs/interests of the society.

Because it is an elective, the students who choose to enroll tend to be engaged, and the discussions have generally been thoughtful and substantive.

The class meets on Tuesday nights, and Tuesday–today– is election day. In consideration of that fact (and, admittedly, the probability that several of them would skip class in order to watch the returns), I decided to forego our usual class meeting in favor of an effort to connect the more abstract principles we have been discussing with the very immediate realities of America’s political environment.

Here is the assignment I gave them. What would your answers be?

________________________

The 2016 election campaigns have been among the most contentious in our history, and have displayed wide—perhaps unbridgeable–disagreements among Americans not just about the comparative merits of individual candidates, but about the proper role of government and the nature of the common good.

Our next class is scheduled for election day. As these campaigns conclude, and in lieu of holding that class, I am asking you to consider the opposing views and attitudes that have been revealed during the course of these campaigns, and to write a 2-3 page essay addressing the following questions:

  • How would you characterize the Presidential candidates’ visions of the common good/national interest?
  • How would you describe their respective approaches to balancing protections of individual rights against the interests of the country as a whole?
  • In the wake of the election, how do you see Americans resolving our very different perspectives and deep disagreements? (In other words, given the incredibly acrimonious nature of the campaigns, do you see efforts at reconciliation or continued animosity, and in either case, with what result?)
  • In your opinion, what is driving Americans’ current partisan polarization and anger?
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