May the Best Man Win

We base our entire politics on the idea that we're living in a meritocracy. In other words, like the knights of old at a joust, we find out who is best through competition, a competition assumed to be both fair and honest. In the old days, the joust was assumed to be fair and honest because God was both omnipotent and just and therefore, obviously, would not allow a bad man to win. Nowadays, even most of us who believe in God don't believe that God controls the outcome of competitions in that way. Yet the assumption of a fair and honest competition persists, despite blatant evidence to the contrary.

In the case of U.S. elections, it is assumed, not that the will of God controls the outcome of competitions, but that the will of the people does. Voter suppression and election fraud are hand-waved away on the dubious grounds that any candidate strong enough could overcome such things. Or maybe the people are to blame. The supporters of the defeated candidate must not have worked hard enough, or maybe the people generally are to blame for not voting in large enough numbers. Those who challenge any of these assumptions are defeated, either by institutional inertia or by gaslighting.

Nothing happens, so nothing happened

Here's what I mean by institutional inertia.

In 2000, there was ample evidence that George W. Bush had committed fraud in the presidential election, with the help of his brother, the governor of Florida. In 2004, there was ample evidence that George W. Bush had committed fraud once again, famously in Ohio, and less famously in Florida for a second time. However, in the first case, Gore stopped fighting after an obviously partisan and corrupt Supreme Court decision, and not a single member of the U.S. Senate was willing to help the Congressional Black Caucus challenge the election. In the second case, Kerry refused to challenge the election in Congress, and the legal case he brought about election fraud, after the fact, did not even make it to the Supreme Court.

In 2016, when New Yorkers brought a case that there had been election fraud and voter suppression in the Democratic primaries, the case was thrown out on the grounds that each county in New York had to file such cases separately, and, by then, the election would be over. Pleas to delay the vote count, or to delay declaring a winner, until the voting rights of the people could be secured, were brushed aside. Much later, when a civil lawsuit was brought against the DNC, the case was once again thrown out for lack of standing, but not before the DNC lawyers had defended their client on the grounds that the DNC didn't have to provide a fair competition, or any competition at all, really, and certainly didn't have to care what the people thought.

The effect of this institutional inertia is not simply that cheaters win the day, or that the people, whose will is being suppressed, lose morale and give up. The complaint itself begins to fade from people's minds. People begin to make excuses for what happened, to justify it, to act as if there never were cheating to begin with. Even many of those who dissent find that, over time, the injustice they remember mellows: no less a person than Jimmy Dore, hardly a weak-minded hack for the establishment, talks now about Gore's "loss" in 2000 as an evil caused by the electoral college. While the electoral college is obviously a tool for elites to control American politics (and never has that been so obvious as over the past two election cycles), such a narrative ignores and erases the police checkpoints that were set up in 2000 near predominantly African American polling places in Leon county, Florida. It ignores the Republican Speaker of the House, Tom DeLay, sending Republican staffers to Dade County to break up Miami's vote count by marching into the Supervisor of Elections office and screaming at the top of their lungs so that no accurate count could take place. It ignores and erases the digital Jim Crow that purged the voter lists of African American Democrats by claiming, falsely, that they were felons. It ignores the fact that emails between the State of Florida and the company that created the Jim Crow software revealed that the company had warned that their software would draw too many false positives, and that the State of Florida had replied "That's just what we want."

Similarly, the DNC's perfidy in 2016 has been reduced to the following: 1) that they had pre-selected their candidate, and didn't provide a real or fair competition, 2) that they gave debate questions ahead of time to Hillary Clinton, 3)that they used the electoral college, most particularly superdelegates, to overwhelm the Sanders movement, and that 4) the party primaries were often closed, not allowing independents the right to vote. Left out, or forgotten, are the multiple polling places closed in states from Arizona to New York (in New York, sometimes even the open polling places had no staff or broken machines), the media calling California for Clinton before the votes were counted, the 136,000 voters purged off Brooklyn's voter rolls (no doubt because Bernie Sanders was born and grew up in Brooklyn and that might have given him an advantage there), and the much larger multi-state purge of the Democratic party through changing people's voter registration without their knowledge and consent.

I'm not bringing this up to attack Jimmy Dore, who is one of the most reliable truth-tellers in the media today, but rather to point out what people's minds do under the stress of watching the establishment normalize corruption again and again. If there is no power to challenge institutional corruption, most people, over time, make of the corruption something less unjust and outrageous. Simply smothering objections to injustice with institutional inertia, will, over time, allow the victors to erase the evidence of their crime.

Sore Loserman

Since we believe, with the faith of fanatics, that competition must be honest and fair, it's easy to gaslight the losers (or the apparent losers). The Republicans in 2000 did not need to disprove the fact that George W. Bush had committed fraud and contravened the will of the people when he climbed up a staircase of disenfranchised Black faces to become President. All the Republicans needed to do was issue tens of thousands of bumper stickers that replaced the words "Gore/Lieberman" with "Sore Loserman." The RNC was using the same argument that was bruited about in the 1980s about poverty and employment. Unemployed poor people had lost the economic competition. Therefore, there must be something wrong with them. Maybe they weren't educated enough, smart enough, clean enough, hard-working enough; maybe they were people of bad character. Bloomberg's racial profiling worked much the same way. Black people are losers in the judicial game because they commit more crimes. That's why we put more police in their neighborhoods, because there are more criminals among young Black men than anywhere else. Corruption can't bring down a meritorious man. If you're good, you'll win. If you complain about cheating or any other form of injustice, you must be a Sore Loserman, attempting to cover up your own inadequacies by whining.

It's pretty obvious that this way of thinking makes it literally impossible to stop even the most outrageous injustice, as long as the perpetrators of that injustice have enough power to spread their "Sore Loser" messaging far and wide. So if I commit identity theft today and access one of your bank accounts, I can be brought to account. But if Wall St cheats homeowners, there was probably something wrong with the homeowners, or with the government for suggesting that those homeowners should get loans. If George W. Bush cheats in an election, there was probably something wrong with the other candidate, or with the voters.

People tend to get upset when I bring this up, because they think that talking about the corruption of the system will demoralize voters, making such discussions their own form of voter suppression. But I bring this up because the worst damage that can come out of Bernie Sanders losing contests in a highly compromised electoral process is that the idea of meritocracy be preserved. There are valid reasons for voting even in a corrupted system (of the "make 'em sweat" variety). There are valid reasons for not voting in a corrupted system. But whatever a citizen chooses to do on Election Day, the idea of meritocracy must die.

Despite all the truly horrendous policies, from both the Democrats and the Republicans, that have laid our society, our people, and the world to waste, the most poisonous effect of the tyranny we live under is its fraudulence: its pretense of being a fair, accurate, and reasonable expression of the will of the people. Even the Democrats' attacks on Trump, who is supposed to be a Manchurian candidate placed in office by Russian intelligence operatives and an existential threat to our democracy, have, in the past two years, increasingly focused on the people who support Trump. It's the voters fault for supporting the bad man. So even when we are supposedly in a situation of foreign powers changing the outcome of a presidential election, it's still the people's fault. Why? Well, there was a competition, and somebody won, so the person who won must be there by the will of the people. It has to be the people's fault.

Corruption among the powerful isn't a thing.

System-wide corruption in all the various infrastructures of our country, especially the political ones, isn't a thing.

Or, if it is, you just didn't do enough lifting at the political gym to be able to fend it off.

Share
up
54 users have voted.

Comments

@Dawn's Meta , because Clinton was routinely hitting way below the belt with him. She was a total asshole throughout (in fact, that's when I began to hate her) because she thought she was entitled to the presidency (narcissistic trait). When it became clear that Obama had won, I think TPTB, whom they both serve, sat them down and gave them a little talk, which convinced them to bury the hatchet, at least publicly. So Hillary got SOS as a consolation prize. But I've seen signs of animosity since then, particularly in Michelle's early reactions to Hillary, but now they're all pampered pets of the oligarchy, enjoying unbelievable luxury, wrapped up in cozy safety and freedom from accountability (and probably civic cataclysms) along with the Bush family and other oligarchic favorites, though Hill's past actions keep nipping at her heels.

They are all owned. But I wouldn't be surprised if the Obamas still hate her privately.

up
19 users have voted.

Lurking in the wings is Hillary, like some terrifying bat hanging by her feet in a cavern below the DNC. A bat with theropod instincts. -- Fred Reed https://tinyurl.com/vgvuhcl

@Dawn's Meta
the money changers split over who would be the front person for the party for the next eight years. All could see that the GOP was so spent in '08 that the Dem nom would win. So, the question was breaking through a 220 year old barrier with a young AA male or a female that would extend the Clinton reign of the DP to twenty or twenty-four years.

In the early going, there was less of a split among Democratic officials; they viewed an AA as a tougher sell than a woman, even among AA women and most of them felt indebted to the Clintons in some way. And it was her turn.

Also what laurel said above.

up
9 users have voted.
TheOtherMaven's picture

@Marie

was that in politics, no white woman ever entered an office without a black man holding the door for her. (And usually the black man was let in by a Jewish man holding the door for him. Obama was able to skip that step.)

up
7 users have voted.

There is no justice. There can be no peace.

@TheOtherMaven
if history was inviolate. And I'm not sure that the first woman in all white and male professions was preceded by an AA man. (It wasn't true in an industry in which I was employed where women got through that door before AA men.)

From 2007 through today, I've maintained that the '08 Democratic nominee would win regardless of the gender or ethnicity of the nominee. There wasn't some all powerful force that decided it was the election cycle for an AA or woman nominee. It had been apparent since 2000 that HRC was itching to run for president ASAP and would have the bucks and connections to do so. At least under the campaign models that had existed through 2000. Obama would not have made it if he'd relied exclusively on that model.

up
7 users have voted.
TheOtherMaven's picture

@Marie @Marie @Marie

White Protestant males > Catholic males > Jewish males > black males > white women. You can look it up if you like.

Obama figured he was so slick he could jump one slot in the queue, and he was right. HER figured she could jump two slots, and was wrong.

up
4 users have voted.

There is no justice. There can be no peace.

@TheOtherMaven
that came before the first AA male president?

I'm well aware of the historical pattern and precedents, but it more reflects the long history of women as being second class citizens than first elevating non-WASPs before women. Not so easy to get elected or appointed when one doesn't have voting rights or unenforced voting rights.

Let's not overlook the fact that a woman was appointed to a US cabinet position thirty-three years before an AA. (Frances Perkin, Secretary DOL, 1933.)

There's still been but one Catholic president.

up
2 users have voted.
TheOtherMaven's picture

@Marie

That WAS my point - he jumped one slot in the "queue". Hills thought she could jump two slots and get in ahead of Obama (this was in 2008) - and fell flat on her face.

If the Confederacy counts (it's debatable), Judah P. Benjamin was a Cabinet officer long before Frances Perkins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judah_P._Benjamin

He had previously been the first overtly Jewish Senator in the US Senate (from Louisiana, if you can believe that).

up
4 users have voted.

There is no justice. There can be no peace.

@TheOtherMaven
out that Perkins -- the first female cabinet secretary -- was appointed decades before the first AA cabinet secretary. (Didn't dispute the order WASP>catholic male>jewish male Only that an AA male comes before a female.) Women and AAs have long been second class citizens in every aspect of our lives.

up
1 user has voted.
PriceRip's picture

          I have found only one effective anecdote to this malady: An overwhelming coherent response that forced the lumbering behemoth to twitch toward the desirable goal.

          Actually, it was a very large number of such responses that did the trick. And, the success was confined to a local region.

          With regard to nationwide socio-economic issues we are doomed to never get the "coherent response" of which I speak. As long as the universally accepted foundational lie is accepted venerated by all we are condemned to continue this slip-sliding-away into the abyss:

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUODdPpnxcA]

RIP

up
8 users have voted.
Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@PriceRip

up
5 users have voted.

"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

PriceRip's picture

up
2 users have voted.
Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@PriceRip

functions like a household budget?

up
3 users have voted.

"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

PriceRip's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

          everyone talks like taxes are income for the government that then spends from that pool of money. This oversimplified "understanding" not only shuts down the conversation, it makes it impossible to have a rational thought about addressing the questions of "what do we do next".

RIP

up
1 user has voted.
Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@PriceRip

up
2 users have voted.

"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

It seems to me that a lot could be gained by running exit polls during primaries and in general election. This used to be standard practice here.(iirc)

Polls could be conducted by volunteers on the ground, keeping costs low. Perhaps a coalition of progessive groups could set it up. I would be happy to donate and volunteer.

Exit polling would serve two purposes:

1) put the light on fraud where it occurs
2) restore confidence in result when exit poll shows contest is on the square

Of course this does not address other types of voter suppression, but is a start on the "fair count" question. As it is we suspect that machines are crooked, but we have nothing to back up our suspicions. Exit polls are accepted as a valid way to determine election honesty.

Thanks.

up
7 users have voted.

@irishking used in the MSM, but are not given the weight they once had (which was good as gold). This is directly b/c of the 2000 presidential election, when the exits "wrongly" showed the mean, vicious Al Gore winning, which of course couldn't have been right.

Even the head of the firm which pioneered US election exit polling, one Mitofsky, backtracked defensively after that race and claimed, with absolutely no evidence, that exits shouldn't be too much relied on as R voters tend not to disclose to pollsters that they voted for the R candidate.

Exit polls, last I checked, now are revised when they are not in synch with the official final count. It's dishonest, but there you are.

Your suggestions are of course quite good, but sadly we still need to get enough people interested in the issue of election integrity. You would think this would have happened after 2000 and 2004 and 2016, but Ds I am told didn't want to emphasize voter suppression/election theft for fear it would drive down voter participation.

up
7 users have voted.
Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@irishking

Exit polls not involving Hillary Clinton or George W. Bush are often very accurate, so I agree with you. Smile

up
2 users have voted.

"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

After the DNC lawsuit from the 2016 debacle, in which the ruling was that the DNC could pick any candidate they wanted to be the nominee regardless of vote count, we know there are no rules. The DNC has point blank told us our vote does not count.

What the DNC does though, is beside the point. The thing that is salient in this whole situation is that Bernie has huge popular approval for his policy proposals. That is what amazes me. Nobody can draw crowds like he can. He shows every day on the campaign trail that people are not stupid. Americans know the score. They know things have to change.

The Bernie phenomenon is the continuation of Occupy. They thought they crushed Occupy but they didn't. It sprang up again. I think there are some creative minds and souls out there who will figure out how to use this momentum.

up
4 users have voted.

I live in Oregon. We vote by mail. There can be none of the shenanigans like in California of needing to request a dem ballot for someone who is registered as independent etc. That all can be worked out weeks or months in advance. And, no MF'ing hours-long lines in poor and black/brown districts! Plus there is the paper ballot for backup. Recounts can be done without questions of hanging chads.
If you don't trust the mail, there are secure post office style white (instead of blue for post office) mailboxes to hand-deliver your ballot.
It's really the way to go IMO. Ron Wyden might be on the neoliberal side, but on this issue, I support his efforts 100% to extend vote-by-mail to the rest of the country.
Voting should be easy. And, voting should be equally easy for all. Not to mention secure and auditable.

up
7 users have voted.
PriceRip's picture

@peachcreek

          (professionals, all) are available (during normal hours over the span of several days) to answer questions you might have.

RIP

up
3 users have voted.

Pages