We did not dodge a bullet when the Supreme Court summarily rejected the Trump campaign’s bogus claims of voter fraud. For sure, if the country had lost the case there would have been significant implications for the future of the democracy. But the sad reality is that the analogy is wrong- there was no bullet to dodge. Instead, we inched closer to the muzzle of a bazooka. What is happening now with the endgame of this post-election period is not about whether Trump or Biden will lead America. The true argument being joined is over what America is and who gets to count as American.
There are a number of different agendas active in the voter fraud circus. Certainly, most of Trump’s decisions for the past 5 years have been about the grift and how he can transfer money from others’ pockets to his. Because the brand is his only money-maker, Trump also has a business need to stay relevant. So what started as a con has turned into a reality for Trump. Like the conman Harold Hill in “The Music Man,” Trump seems to believe that “there always is a band.”
The grift is too simple an explanation about what is going on[i]. 126 Congressmen and 18 governors who signed onto the court case are not on the take, at least for this topic. They are not part of the big con that Trump is playing. And yet when The Hill surveyed the GOP congressional members, they found that of the approximately 200 respondents, half did not acknowledge Biden as the President-elect, and about a quarter “…said they did not believe Trump had lost his election, or that Biden’s win was legitimate.”[ii] Meanwhile the goalposts continually move for what constitutes a Biden win, evolving from counting all the votes, to recounting, to waiting for the courts to rule, to the meeting of the electors, to the acceptance of the electors in Congress. How can supposedly smart people with access to more information than the rest of us claim openly to believe something so obviously false? Clearly the goal is not to get to the truth but to keep the self-fulfilling and circular outrage alive.
One school of thought for the motive is that the GOP hopes to repeat their Obama playbook, as written by Trump and the birthers, and use the controversy to de-legitimize the incoming administration. Another theory is that the elected officials in gerrymandered districts fear a primary opponent on their right. I believe both of these theories are missing the big picture.
Let us start by analyzing the primary election argument. That election will take place in 2 years, and there is plenty of time between now and then to crow about how the incumbents have actively halted the country’s lurch towards Socialism, or whatever the boogeyman of the day will be while eviscerating everything Biden is hoping to accomplish to get the country back on firm personal, security, and economic health. Their opponents to the right will look weak in comparison if their only argument is that the incumbent was not Trumpy enough. So this argument probably does not account for many of those crying “fraud” today.
The other argument is about Biden’s legitimacy. This is a tougher case to make, because no one can claim foreign influence or birth certificate irregularities. And all the noise about Hunter Biden’s taxes will fade once Trump and his family are forced to stand in state court and defend their tax profligacy. Biden received 7.9 million more votes than Trump- a blowout only bested by a few others since 1900. There’s a whole lot of legitimacy that goes along with that, and certainly more than the squeaker of Bush vs. Gore, with Bush receiving 540,000 fewer votes than Gore (come to think about it, the GOP has only won the popular vote in one of the last 7 presidential contests). Furthermore, it would take a significant algorithm to get the distribution of the alleged illegitimate votes correct while not messing up the down-ballot races and their expected results.
I suggest that the issue is not the grift or the kneecapping of Biden, although both of these tactics impart some benefit on their perpetrators. Instead, I argue that election fraud claims are part of a long game of voter suppression that has its roots in the founding of the country. This is not some bullet from a wildly shooting gunman to take what he can from a short-term victory. This is actually the latest act in an ongoing American drama of deciding who’s votes count.
We quote the “all men are created equal” phrase from the Declaration of Independence as if it is a governing principle. Nothing could be further from the truth. We fret over the paradox that the Founders were also slaveholders. That was not a bug in the system, instead it represented the belief that the law should be established to protect property, and therefore property owners (including those who treat human beings as property) have the right to define the law.[iii] The struggle between the rights of property owners to establish the laws and the rights of all others is ensconced in the founding debates[iv], many of which concluded that property owners were people too[v], and thus would preserve human rights generally. More often than not throughout American history, the rights of property owners have dominated, which enables wealthy oligarchs to define enfranchisement, with the assumption of disenfranchisement of the right to suffrage to all others. In the early days of the country, the belief was that only a certain group of people had the ability to make good decisions for society, which meant the enslaved, the indigenous, and the XX-chromosomed should not have the right. The concern of course was that personal rights would infringe on the rights of property owners to enrich themselves, so the right must be curtailed. Equality was assured for landowners, but others needed to be held outside in order to prevent them from messing up the works. In other words, equality is dependent on inequality, and by extension, providing equality to others results in inequality relative to the original intent. As marginalized groups gained a foothold, the argument was made that the new groups were taking what was rightfully owned by those who marginalized them by law. All stops needed to be pulled out in order to maintain the status quo, and class distinction was to be weaponized and “the other” demonized in order to enlist foot soldiers to defend those at the top.
The old argument that only the anointed in America society should be trusted with the right to suffrage pervades our political thinking and is a through-line in America’s history. On the floor of the Senate in 1858, Senator James Hammond of South Carolina argued that the South was smarter than the North in that the North allowed the bootless and unhorsed to vote, but not so in the South. Hammond stated “… our slaves do not vote. We give them no political power. Yours do vote, and being the majority, they are the depositaries (sic) of all your political power. If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than ‘an army with banners,’ and could combine, where would you be? Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided, not as they have mistakenly attempted to initiate such proceedings… with arms in their hands, but by the quiet process of the ballot-box.”[vi] One hundred years later, the founder of modern conservatism, William F. Buckley, Jr., echoed Hammond’s sentiments. In a 1957 op-ed for the National Review. Buckley opined that if disenfranchised voters would only vote the way White men did, there would be no reason to attempt to take away their vote. Shockingly, he wrote “The central question that emerges…. Is whether the White community… is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes…. If the majority wills what is atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened.” Ponder that for a moment: the founder of the conservative movement that ushered in Reaganism, union busting, the Federalist Society, and trickle-down economics, has the temerity to define anything that is against the interests of the landed gentry as “atavistic” and therefore subject to being ignored through limiting access to the ballot box. The roadmap for the claims of voter fraud is therefore laid bare as a means to suppress the votes of under-represented communities in the interests of protecting the status quo. So it is no surprise, when we fast forward to 2020, that we have the likes of Senator Rand Paul stating that[vii] he is….”very concerned that if you solicit votes from typically non-voters, that you will affect and change the outcome. So, I’m very worried that the Democrats will control all three branches of government and they will really, truly transform America, and not for the better.” Henry Hammond could not have stated it more clearly, nor provided a more definitive strategy and rationalization for voter suppression.[viii]
My point is that these events are disturbing, but they should not be shocking. James Madison told us this was going to happen. Henry Hammond laid it out clearly as the Southern strategy (made famous a century later by Goldwater and Nixon), and modern conservatism are openly dependent on voter suppression. Our history says that, unless we actively address it, America will continue to be supportive of voter suppression as a dominant political principle. That means the fight needs to be joined at the point of strategic advantage: we cannot allow ourselves to be led down a rabbit hole chasing voter fraud lies. The 18th century Scottish philosopher, David Hume, made clear in A Treatise of Human Nature that it is essentially impossible to use inductive reasoning to prove that an event did not happen. The claim of many Republicans in the House and Senate that they want to count all the legal votes and none of the illegal votes sounds logical, but it falls into Hume’s inductive reasoning trap, demanding that a negative be proved while tossing out an endless stream of unsubstantiated examples in an attempt to force the discussion towards a proof of a negative. Do not waste time on that as it is philosophically impossible. The primary issue is one of voting rights and voter suppression. The Republican strategy is not to keep Trump in office; most of them will be happy to see his back. Their strategy is to suppress votes through specious claims of fraud as they attempt to force the conversation on their terms. Do not fall for it. This is a fight about who matters in America and whose voices deserve to be heard. The conversation should not be about the tactics of ballot fraud, but instead about enabling equality for all. We must stop dodging the bullet, and instead take away the bazooka for the first time in American history. Armed with this knowledge, it is to the country’s advantage for those who believe in equality, not the maintenance of the status quo, to place our political investments in organizations fighting suppression throughout the nation.
[i] That being said, Trump is amassing a huge war chest by appealing to his supporters. In what may be the biggest example in the morality play to prove my point of this entry, yet again Trump has figured out how to make the little guy pay for his needs. The oligarch has convinced those he sees as below him that he is protecting them and their rights while taking away their means of support.
[ii] https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/530739-legislative-survey-shows-deep-gop-divide-on-election?userid=351485
[iii] For an excellent description of the history, see Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War (2020)
[iv] See for instance notes from James Madison during the Constitutional Convention where he lays out the challenges: http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llfr&fileName=003/llfr003.db&recNum=453
[v] There are historical echoes here of Mitt Romney’s “corporations are people too” gaffe during his presidential campaign
[vi] https://www.americanantiquarian.org/Freedmen/Manuscripts/cottonisking.html. Hammond was a notorious slavery proponent whose writings are replete with the basest racist rants. It is valuable to keep this in mind whenever someone wants to make the argument that Confederate monuments are merely nods to heritage. Despite the fact that Hammond was an admitted rapist, having sexually abused his 4 nieces, the school’s founders saw fit in 1966 to name the James H. Hammond Academy after him. The school was founded as a segregated school in response to the court ordered racial integration of the Columbia public school system, and lost its tax-exempt status in 1972 when it refused to provide evidence of a non-discriminatory admissions process.
[vii] https://www.motherjones.com/2020-elections/2020/12/rand-paul-is-very-very-concerned-with-eligible-voters-voting/
[viii] It is also amusing the consider that Senator Paul, never one to be overly burdened by truth or facts, is implying that the 3 branches of government are the Presidency, the Senate, and the House.
