The Political Drowning Pool

 

Asphyxiation

In medicine, there is a condition called “delayed drowning.”  It happens when a person inhales water but seems to be “fine” until suddenly they aren’t.  Delayed drowning typically occurs about 24 hours after the initial event, when the trachea spasms and shuts down, killing the person.

Democracy in the United States at this moment is very likely facing a delayed drowning event, where it seems to have recovered from the events of 1/6, but will probably drop dead, seemingly without warning, in 4 years’ time.  This is because the Republicans have set up a probable no-win scenario that will end the very idea of any sort of majority rule for the selection of the President.

Part of this stems from the Constitution, and the fact that the framers had literally no intention of ever allowing the majority to truly select the president.  They set up a complex system of allowing the states to determine how the Electors were determined, and then established the Electoral College to give significantly more power to small states than large ones.  In total, they set up a system where “the people” had a very limited say in who became the Head of both the State and the Government.  The fact that for most of the last century, the President was the winner of both the popular vote, and the REAL vote, is actually more of an accident than any deliberate intent.  And this is exactly what the Founding Fathers intended.  They never really wanted the unwashed masses to be able to choose the president in the first place, a fact demonstrated by the lack of inclusion of the right to vote anywhere in either the original document or in the Bill of Rights.  Under their ideals and intent, both Bush’s and Trump’s victories would be proof that their system worked, rather than failures of that same system.  To the Founders, it would show that the Electoral College served the stated purpose of tempering the masses and avoiding what Jefferson explicitly called “mob rule.”

This is the core of the argument behind much of what is going on in the States today.  While there might be other motives at work, and we can certainly speculate what they could be, the general principles that the Republicans argue are based in the foundational documents of the country, which sadly do support their side more than they do the points of view of the Democrats.  We can see this in play every time a Republican (correctly) argues that the United States is not a Democracy, it is a Republic.  It is also shown by the Federalist Society’s insistence on judges that are “strict constructionists,” who believe that the Constitution must be read according to the specific intent of the Framers.

However, two and a half centuries have passed since those documents were written, and it is certainly legitimate to question the wisdom of people who lived in a completely different society, and whether those antiquated views have a place in a modern Democracy.  This is the view of those who consider the Constitution to be a “living document,” and that we need to adhere to the spirit of the Constitution rather than the explicit text.  This is how modern jurists can “discover” rights, such as the Right to Privacy, that were never explicitly spelled out.  It also allows judges to sanction things that were inconceivable in the early days of the country.

We can also say that while the Founders may have intended a true Republic, the current understanding is that the U.S. is, at most, a Democratic Republic, where it is “One Person, One Vote.”  We can reject the Founder’s views, and not undermine what they built.  We can say the “arc of history bends toward justice,” and validate what the country stands for now.  We can stand firm and say, “yes, they had an idea of what the country should look like, but we have moved on form that, and we want to evolve into a more democratic (with a little “d”) nation, where we all have an equal say in how the country is governed.

However, this is increasingly improbable, and we are quite likely on an irreversible road, because the “checks and balances” in the Constitution are not just there to check the powers of each branch of government, they are there, more importantly in the Founders’ views, to check the power of the people.  And because of this fact, majority rule in the country is probably going to have a delayed drowning, that will all be perfectly legal, constitutional, and utterly horrific.

Before I explain this, I need to say something about strategy.  Democrats are generally “reaction based,” something happens, and they react to it.  They generally reel from situation to situation without much, if any, long-term planning.  They deal with things when  they become urgent, and because of that, there is generally not an examination of long term consequences, nor is there a coherent strategy behind their actions.  Democrats are generally expert in crisis management, and good at responding at immediate needs, but there isn’t a far reaching plan involved, and they typically have no idea on how to weave a larger narrative out of these short term fixes. 

Republicans, as befits a pro-military organization, strategize, and plan battles far in advance.  They plan for contingencies, lay traps, advance and retreat, without ever losing sight of the big picture.  While they may sometimes not seem disciplined on the surface, every single thing they do advances a larger strategy.  Because of this, they are conversely terrible at addressing the unexpected, sudden and surprising, and consequently frequently botch response to hurricanes, economic crises, and black swan events.  That said, they are very good at incorporating those events into their larger, long term strategy.

As my father, who was a career military officer said, “a battle is won or lost before the first shot is fired.  If you don’t know who is going to win before you take the field, you will not be the winner.”  And the Republicans know they ultimately, they WILL be the winners.  There is always the chance that the Democrats could luck out, that an unexpected event will change the battlefield, but in general, the better strategy almost always wins.

And this leads to why the America we currently know is in its final months.  To explain why they will win; they have set up a literal no win scenario for the Democrats, whether it is by brute force, or by hanging the country on the structure of the Constitution, they are likely going to be victorious.

The brute force option is the simplest course, but certainly the hardest and the one most likely to end in total violence.  For this scenario, we can posit in 2024, a Republican candidate, probably Trump, declares victory, and his supporters take over the Congress and force the issue, staging a successful version of the trial run of 2021 coup attempt.

However, this probably will not pass even a very compliant Supreme Court, and consequently, this is not the likely route unless they are absolutely certain that they will succeed.  It will also likely kick off an actual Civil War, which again, they will probably not want unless they can be absolutely sure that large parts of the military, and the billionaire set, will support them.  However, the advantage of this path for them is that if they win, they will know that they will have permanent power, and can abandon even a pretense of democracy.  Many pundits fear this happening, and it is getting a lot of press, which is overall a good thing, but it is ignoring the much more realistic course of action for the Republicans.    

The long game that they are establishing now is the more likely path.  Although this will lack the “drama” that Trump seems to love, nor will it be as overtly decisive in completely establishing a new order, it will be completely legal, and probably be easily ratified by 6 Supreme Court Justices.  For the “Law and Order” party, this fact will be very important.  The fact that it is also completely legal will likely cause most Democrats to roll over and accept it.   

Buried in many of these “election security” bills passing in Red States, and in states with enough of a majority in the Assemblies to override gubernatorial vetoes, are clauses that will allow the states to override the results of the popular vote and select the electors themselves.  Again, this is perfectly Constitutional, and the Supreme Court recently reinforced that States have absolute authority to determine the election rules.  And, as stated before, there is no requirement in the Constitution that electors must be selected by popular vote in a state, and in a Republic, it is certainly possible to claim that the vote for a state legislator fits within the system of representation; the state elects an Assembly, which then, “in their wisdom of what they were elected to do” can select the electors for President.  This was the original system to select US Senators and is fully compliant with the intent of the Founding Fathers.  It also fits neatly in the Federalist Papers, and most of the other writings around the formation of our government. 

With these laws in place, it is only a matter of a completing the process, again, completely compliant with the Constitution.  Step one is that the States will ratify electors for the Republican, again probably, but not certainly, Trump.  This will give that candidate an Electoral College victory, regardless of the popular vote.  They may claim that the vote was corrupted, or that they have evidence of fraud, or they might just say that they are acting in the “best interests of their constituents” as a justification, but in any case, they will send Republican electors to vote in the ACTUAL election.  Despite the weight the population of the country puts on it, the General Election, at least for President, is literally just an opinion poll that everyone can participate in.  The ONLY actual election occurs when the Electoral College meets.

But the plan doesn’t, and can’t, end there.  In theory, if the Democrats controlled one or both Houses of the Congress, they could refuse to certify.  Now, given their outrage over Republicans pulling this in 2021, they will be extremely unlikely to do so, because the accusation of “hypocrite” hurts Democrats disproportionally more severely than Republicans.  However, if they did this, which they can under the Constitution, then the next stage of the Republican’s plan kicks in.  By the Constitution, a contested election is settled by the House. 

In theory, if the Democrats held the House, you would think the outcome is certain, and they would elect the Democrat.  But again, the Founders had NO interest in Majoritarianism, and in that election, it is based on one vote per state, where the majority of Representatives in THAT state decide on their vote.  In this system, Wyoming has exactly the same power as California, which is a greater distortion of power than even the Electoral College.  The Constitutional backup to the Electoral College is even less majoritarian than the College itself.  Every step in the process makes the will of the masses less important, which again can be used to validate minority rule in America.  As the Republicans, structurally, will almost certainly dominate more states, the House vote will deliver a Republican President.  The Supreme Court will not interfere with this, as this has all been done perfectly Constitutionally, and further, will meet all of the tests of a Strict Constructionist judiciary.

Then we enter the crazy phase.  If this were to happen, it is likely that the Democrats will do exactly what the Trump supporters did in 2021, and engage in large scale, sustained violence, leaving Biden the responsibility of either putting down the insurrection, and allowing a completely legal usurpation of power to occur, or to throw in with the revolutionaries and tear down the country.

This brings us full circle to the title of this post, “the Political Drowning Pool.”  A drowning pool is created when water flows over a shallow structure, creating an almost invisible, but virtually inescapable, current that sucks a person down.  The states are building a shallow structure designed to create inescapable political currents that will ultimately drown the United States.

The only way to escape a drowning pool is to not get into it in the first place.  The only way to escape this trap in 2024, is to change the course of the political river in 2022.  This is NOT winning the US House and Senate.  Doing that will do nothing to escape the inexorable trap that is being built.  What we HAVE to do is win state legislatures and governorships all across the United States.  If we do not take back enough states to have complete control of 271 Electoral College votes, Democracy will fall, legally, and exactly as the Founding Fathers intended.  After all, this is a Republic.

The Caesar of American Democracy Recast as Kitty Genovese

Endings

Democracy in the United States is either dead or very close to it, bleeding out in a gutter outside the stage door.  That is an inflammatory statement that I’m sure will send many of you sticking your fingers in your ears and screaming “LA LA LA,” probably because of the Cassandra effect.  No one wants to hear this sort of thing, because we are so certain the American system will protect us.

Unfortunately, that is a dangerous denialism, and one that is contributing to our inevitable doom.

And before I get started, I want to clear the air, this is not specifically an anti-Trump piece; Trump is a symptom, not the direct cause.  At best he will simply, as Morris Berman puts it, greatly hasten our end.  The forces at play are significantly larger than one man.  That said, because Trump is so overtly autocratic and dictatorial, these forces that have been hiding beneath the surface of the swamp are now rising like methane gas on a hot summer day.

First, let’s start with the background.  The beginnings of end of democracy in America can be traced back to the tenure of Ronald Reagan, and especially the economic policies he put into operation.  Reagan presided over the first of the great upward wealth redistributions through regressive taxation policy. 

Regressive taxation is defined as taxes that more heavily impact the poor than the wealthy.  A good example of this sort of taxation is the sales tax where a $7.00 tax on a $100.00 purchase is much harder on a poor person than on someone who is wealthy.  The opposite policy, progressive taxation, is exemplified by Income Tax, which increases its rate as the income brackets go up. 

Ronald Reagan slashed the upper tax brackets tax percentage, which under Eisenhower actually approached 90% at the highest levels, while leaving the lower tax rates substantially unchanged.  This meant the Reagan Tax Cut was heavily skewed towards helping the rich, and it can be argued, by hurting the poor.  This single act started tilting the balance of power in America towards the wealthy, and also started us down the road of the massive disparity in net worth at the ends of the spectrum. 

But, it wasn’t the only thing that set the stage.  Reagan eviscerated Unions, which provided a strong counterbalance to management.  He demonized the poor, through the new myth of the “Welfare Queen,” which he used to roll back civil rights, reversing some, but not all, of the gains of the 60s.  More importantly, he solidified the Republican Party into a majority White and Christian party, which set the stage for one party to consistently oppose any real social progress.  And, as we will see later, he reenergized the power of the shadow side of the government that came close to extinction during Watergate.  Iran/Contra was a full fledged rebirth of the so called “deep state,” which most presidents since have nurtured and grown.

The Democrats, however, are not blameless in this subversion of democracy.  In fact, after Reagan, Bill Clinton is the person most responsible for the decline of the American Concept.  Clinton, not Reagan, deregulated the banks and set the stage for the bubble/burst cycle of Shock Economics that left the middle class barely hanging on for dear life.   He finished off, for all intents and purposes, the social safety net that had been established in the 30’s, “ending welfare as we know it.”  He cut the deficit, which is arguably a good thing, but he did it by cutting programs that help people rather than by cutting a bloated and at point, largely unnecessary, Defense Department.

However, these things, at least on the surface, do not demonstrate the end of Democracy.   They show warped priorities, bad ideas, and poor policy decisions.  But if you look behind the curtain you begin to see the actual stabbing of democracy, the Ides of March of the American Ideal, because the murder didn’t occur in the public forum, it happened off stage, and people only have hinted that it even happened at all.

But every murderer leaves behind traces of what they have done, and in this case, the visible knife is the 2016 election.  And don’t misunderstand, the victim probably wouldn’t be any less dead had Hillary won, we simply wouldn’t be seeing the blood dripping off of her hands like we do Trump’s.

In this case, the indicator of the murder can be found in coalitions.

Political science defines the coalition size as one of the markers between “democracies” (including republics and parliamentary systems with a constitutional monarch) and “autocracies” (including oligarchies, dictatorships and theocracies)

In a democracy, the rulers keep power by giving benefits to large segments of the population.  In fact this is a necessity of any government; you need to “reward” your supporters with gifts.  However, to be elected, you need at least a plurality of votes, if not an outright majority.  This means that the giveaways cannot be personally benefiting to the voters, at least not directly.  You need to reward your coalition with policies that please them, be it social programs, stronger militaries, or heavy infrastructure investment.  Usually, the winning coalition is promised a mix of rewards in all three arenas. 

Additionally, it is critical to deliver broad prosperity to your country to remain in power.   The best rewards are meaningless in democracies if they are not paired with a general sense of well-being, or at least an idea that there is hope of things getting better.  This is the message that swept Obama into office in 2008, the idea that he could “fix things.”  Even though things still weren’t great in 2012, he still could offer the promise that things were actually getting better.  In short, he won and remained in office because of the power of a large coalition.

On the other hand, autocracies do not depend on a large coalition, they depend on a small group of the “elect” who help them maintain their power.  Because this group is small, the rewards are much more personal, and generally are in the form of financial remuneration for support.  The larger population is meaningless, at least in terms of maintaining power, as they have no actual say in the government.  In an autocracy, the masses are either distracted through forms of the Roman “bread and circuses” or though such profound oppression that they dare not speak out.  And in a successful autocracy, it is usually a combination of distraction and oppression that mitigate the threat the masses might otherwise pose to the regime.

Putin is a perfect example of this.  The Russian oligarchs have become fabulously rich in his regime, while the masses have been marginalized.  But Putin, unlike Stalin, mixes circuses in with outright threats.  He makes sure the masses are relatively comfortable and well fed, with many of the trappings that they didn’t have during the Soviet rule.  But he also jails (or often kills) opponents with enough regularity that people understand that opposing his rule is a quick way to end up in a modern gulag or dead.

And this sets us up to examine the rapidly expiring body of American Democracy.

While we do not have overt oligarchs (yet) or obvious small coalition policies, if you look at the legislative agenda of the Republican Party, you can see that the large coalition (most of us) being sacrificed for the sake of the small coalition.  Every major piece of Republican legislation benefits a very small group of Americans, generally at the expense of the masses.

First, lets examine the attempt to repeal Obamacare.  While this law did not have majority support until recently, it was a good example of “large coalition” policy.  Although it could have actually gone further, and had fewer rewards for large national corporations, it was audacious in its attempt to provide affordable health care to the majority of Americans.  This is the type of thing a “democratic” leader needs to do to remain in power, give rewards to large swaths of the population.

However, “Trumpcare” does the exact opposite.  Despite the spin that the Republican Party is trying to spread, the ACHA bill does not help large segments of the population.  In fact, according to the CBO, it will cause 24 million people to lose access to insurance.  That is not smart “large coalition” policy, because all of the spin in the world will not matter when stories start to circulate about people dying or going bankrupt from illnesses that Obamacare would have treated.

However, the ACHA does profoundly benefit one group of people, the wealthy, especially the extremely wealthy; basically the people who compose approximately one percent of our population.  That certainly looks like “small coalition” politics.  When Grandma dies despite an early diagnosis of breast cancer or the baby bankrupts his parents because of his childhood leukemia, people are going to get angry.  And as the 24 million people who are going to be hurt the most live in “red states” this SHOULD be electoral suicide for them, and should make most of them run screaming from the bill

But it’s not and they are not.  This is because the large coalition no longer figures into their calculus. 

And all the policies are this way.  The EPA, school lunches, Medicare, Climate Change, National Parks, bank regulation and many other things targeted by the Trump Administration have deep support across the country, and ending them should be completely off the table in a large coalition situation.

However, there is one group that is generally against all of these things, the neo-oligarchs who form the new coalition.  These billionaires throw gouts of money into elections, facilitate the spread of outright lies, and manipulate the rules through gerrymandering and other nefarious techniques to circumvent the will of the people.

And they write articles like this one, which is in the “Liberal” Huffington Post, which claims democracy is not necessarily the best form of government. 

And through these examples, we can see how democracy is being killed.  The large coalition that drove American politics for the last century is rapidly being replaced by the small.

However, it is not entirely hopeless, and there is still a chance that massive blood transfusions can still save the patient.  We were in much the same position at the end of the Gilded Age, when J.P. Morgan felt that he could personally call the shots in this country.  Teddy Roosevelt showed him the truth, that a powerful president, with a broad base of support across the country, could reign in the small coalition that had become convinced that the United States was their personal playground.  A lesson that his nephew, Franklin, also taught to Morgan’s ideological successors, ushering in the largest coalition democracy the world had ever seen via his “New Deal.”

But absent the large coalition of Americans, from both parties, uniting against the real enemy of the neo-oligarchs, democracy, in this country and likely most of the world, is bleeding to death unseen behind the forum.  And at this point, people are watching, and possibly recording the death on their phones, but not actually trying to save her. 

Don’t Fear the Tax Man, Unless He Only Comes For Thee

Taxation

In my last blog, I examined how Democrats work their payouts to their supporters, so that they can retain, and hopefully expand, their winning collation.  As I explained in that post, Social Safety Net programs like Social Security and Medicare, are specifically designed to help large swaths of the population in the hope that people who need those programs will support the party that created them, in other words, prompt them to vote for the Democrats.

And the Republicans, to combat this, must engage in a strategy to make people believe these programs are not sustainable, and then they must offer an alternative carrot to the voters.  The one that they have fixated on is “Lower Taxes.”  Their point behind this is that if taxes were lower, people could put money aside for their own old age.  It stresses personal responsibility over shared burdens.  And honestly, like all public policies, it has both a good side and a bad side, some truths, some lies.  But at the end, it is simply an alternate vision, designed to woo voters to their side.

Or, I should say, it was, until the administration of George W. Bush.

Now it is a harbringer of a sea change in American politics, one that can be read to show that democracy is no longer really needed or desired.  Until “W,” tax cuts were either targeted to the poor, as in the Earned Income Credit (a Gerald Ford policy) or an across the board tax rate reduction, as in the Regan Tax Cuts.  These tax policies benefited a wide swath of voters, and could be viewed as a way for the Republicans to combat the social programs of the Left and draw in voters.  This actually worked for Reagan, who won re-election by an astounding margin.

But, with the Bush II tax cuts, something seemed to change.  Although taxes were still cut across the board, the bulk of the tax cuts were targeted to the super wealthy.  In fact, the richer the person, the better they did with the Bush Tax Cut.  Since 2008, the Republicans across the country have doubled down on this policy, and the bulk of the tax cuts have benefited multi-millionaires, basically the 1% Club.  Although crumbs are still thrown at the Middle Classes, many, and sometimes most, people actually see their taxes go up under current Republican policies.  The only uniform beneficiaries are at the top end of the tax rates.

At the moment, people are still accepting this, because the story has been sold, and bought, that the rich pay far more than their fair share.  Even though this is true on a certain level, progressive tax policy recognizes that Bill Gates can afford a 5 million dollar annual tax bill far better than a minimum wage earner can afford a 500 dollar one.  I should note here, progressive in this usage does not refer to the political left, it simply refers to the idea that taxes increase the more money you make, and go down the less you earn.  Regressive taxes are the opposite, and hit poor people harder than the rich.  Sales Tax, which is uniform, regardless of your income, is an example of a regressive tax.

However, the tax changes currently under consideration by Trump bring regressive taxation to the fore.  Two policies especially are extremely regressive; removal of the child deduction and elimination of the mortgage deduction.  These two policies are among the most progressive tax exemptions, as poor and middle class people spend a lot more of their income, percentage wise, on children and interest.

It’s almost like Trump could care less about using tax policy to win voters.

In fact, this becomes very similar to the payouts that you see in dictatorships and monarchies.  This is because this payout affects only a tiny percentage of the voters, and screws over the rest.  In fact, from a political standpoint, this would be very, very stupid, as the last thing you want to do in a democracy is piss off a sizable percentage of the population.

Unless you no longer care about democracy.

And this is where these policies begin to terrify me.  If Trump was concerned about winning elections in the standard method, i.e. winning the popular vote, he would want to make sure his agenda benefited the widest swath of people.  But what if he didn’t care about that?  What if he, and the Republicans in general, were no longer interested in paying off a large segment of the population?  What if they were only worried about gaining the support of a small, but very powerful, segment of the population?

In that case, their policies would look a lot like these; screw the bulk of the voters and further enrich the already rich and powerful.  That is not the pattern of behavior in a democracy, where you have to please wide swaths of the population, that is the behavior of a party unconcerned about democracy.

In a democracy, you have to get 51 percent of the people, or at least the voters, to vote for you.  This doesn’t matter in a non-democratic country, where the leaders are selected through some other method.  And here, I would like to point out, despite a earning 3 million vote margin, Hillary Clinton is not the president.  So the finger of inequity is already on the scales.

So, tax cuts that are specifically targeted to the richest segment of society are casting light on a real problem, one that may grow, unless we do something about it.  Up until recently, these massive tax cuts for the rich have gained widespread approval because of the aspirational nature of American Society.  We all expect to be rich someday.  In fact, most people consider themselves to just be “temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” to quote John Steinbeck.

However, income inequality is beginning to raise its head, as many, maybe even most, people begin to recognize their children will do no better in life than they did.  Worse, many people have to face the fact that their children will not do as well.  The aspirations are more and more becoming obvious pipe dreams. This very well grounded concern is what actually pushed Trump into the White House, at least if post election surveys are to be believed.

However, the actual policies being enacted don’t follow from addressing the concerns of the constituents.  The actual policies are very much those of an oligarchy, where the “peasants” have no voice.  Why would this be?

Perhaps it is because they know that they can ride this wave for a couple of elections, get their policies enshrined in such a way that they will be hard to undo.  Possibly they think that they can say that the opposition to helping the poor was “too great,” and use that to fuel outrage to gain even larger margins.  Perhaps this is simply a bait and switch operation, where they feel that they can con the voters into voting against their self interest for years to come.

Or it could be a much darker reality.

Perhaps they have decided that we are moving down a new path, one that doesn’t need millions of voters.  Possibly they no longer care if people are happy, now that they have the majority.  Maybe they think that democracy is a bad idea, and they want to shift to something new, something that will pay off fabulously for them at the expense of the rest of us.  It is possible they believe the democratic experiment has run its course.

If this is the case, the rest of us need to show them just how wrong they actually are.

The Carrot and the Stick

Bankrupt

There is a reason why Republicans have to insist that the country, and especially the Social Safety Net Programs are “bankrupt.”  (And I refuse to use the Right’s framing of these programs as “Entitelements.”  That pejorative term automatically frames these programs in an extremely negative way.)  I would love to say that this is just an aspect of their slavish devotion to “personal responsibility” but unfortunately, I cannot.  I would even like to say that it is because they want to prove to people that government is always the cause, not the solution, of life’s problems.  The truth, I fear, is much darker.  After reading “The Dictator’s Handbook” a much more devious reason for this attack presented itself.

They need to convince Democrats that their support for their party will not net them anything, because the Democrats will not be able to deliver.

To explain this, I need to give some background.  All rulers, be they monarchs, tyrants or presidents, need to basically bribe their supporters with payouts.  I recognize that this sounds deeply cynical, mainly because it is.  However, this is the fact of how all governments function.  In a Monarchy or Dictatorship, the number of people who need to receive payment for their support is relatively small.  A group of people including the leaders of the military, wealthy patrons, and other strategically placed individuals are sufficient to keep the ruler in power.  And because the number is small, the payments can be quite lavish. 

For examples of this, reflect on the personal wealth of the men who supported Hosni Mubarak in Egypt or King Salman of Saudi Arabia.  Or for that matter, although Russia is not strictly a Dictatorship, Vladimir Putin.  The people who surround these leaders are immensely wealthy, and much of their riches stem from their support of the leader.  In Saudi Arabia, as most of the powerful men in the country are also related to the King, there is also an aspect of Dynastic Wealth.  For the others though, there are no blood ties to the leaders, only financial ties.  But these financial ties bind the support of the inner circle.  If the payments are cut off, as with Mubarak, the key supporters will quickly turn on the person in charge.

However, in a democracy, there is not the ability to enrich a select group to guarantee remaining in power.  Also, in a democracy like the United States, there are term limits that keep a person from staying in the Presidency for more than 8 years.  This means that if there was a small group running a democracy, they would run the risk of losing their gravy train with each election, and the democracy would quickly turn dictatorial simply so the money would keep flowing into their pockets.

This means, both structurally (a large number of voters must elect the leader) and effectively (no single person can enrich themselves) that democracies must function differently.  Democracies must deliver a flow of benefits to a very specific group of voters in the country, and that requires large scale programs.

In the United States, this means the Democrats create social safety net programs that benefit large groups of people, and Republicans advocate tax cuts that similarly benefit a wide group in the population.  I will deal with the Republican strategy in my next blog, as there are some worrying signs in tax policy that need to be discussed.

But basically, the Democratic strategy has always been to deliver things to a wide segment of the population in the forms of things like Social Security, Unemployment, Medicare, low cost education, etc, etc.  This is an excellent strategy, because most people will need one or more of these programs in their lives, and people will often vote their own self interest.  In fact, the creation of these programs created Democratic dominance on the national level for close to 50 years.  In fact, there were only 16 years of Republicans holding the Presidency between 1932 and 1980, and the two Republicans elected in that time had no interest in eliminating any of the social programs that had been instituted by the other party.

However, that all changed with Ronald Reagan. 

Reagan delivered two simultaneous killing blows to the Democrats, tax cuts and the deficit.  Until Reagan, deficits were not something that were particularly concerning, both because they were small compared to GDP and government bonds were a strong and positive method of saving money.  But Reagan changed this; he slashed taxes and because of this raised the deficit to astronomical, for the time, levels.  This allowed him to spin the story that the government was going “bankrupt” because of the social safety net.

And that statement deeply damaged the Democratic Party, because of the need to reward the base.  Suddenly, the programs that people voted Democratic to support seemed to be on the verge of evaporating.  It became a real fear, for example, that you might pay into Social Security your whole life only to find the trust fund empty when you were ready to draw benefits.  And then he raided the Social Security Trust Fund to make that possibility seem even more likely.  This dramatically eroded support for the Democrats among White Americans, support that, by and large has never returned, because Social Security is one of only two programs that almost all Americans know that they will be able to participate in.  The other is Medicare.

All of the other Social Safety net programs have the appearance of supporting the “unworthy” which is code for minorities and poor people.  It is no surprise that minority support for the Democrats has remained solid, because they know that they may need some of these other programs.  White people need them as well, but there is such a stigma about the benefits at this point that taking them is a point of shame, so there is little support for them, even as whites use them far more than minorities, both in terms of percentage and raw numbers.

So suddenly, Reagan took away the “Reagan Democrats” and won a second term by one of the largest victories since Washington.  He didn’t just win on his message, he won because he convinced a nation that these programs were going bankrupt and the Democrats would never be able to pay off their supporters.

At the same time, he offered another benefit that seemed perfectly targeted to the people, tax cuts.  This meant that voters would have more money in their pockets, and thereby offset the loss of Social Security.  And this was a winning strategy, and violating it, as Bush Sr. did, cost him the election.  Bill Clinton offered at least the possibility of having social programs maintained, while voters knew that Bush had violated HIS promise of “no new taxes.”  One offered the possibility of a payout, while the other had a reality of eliminating one.  Consequently Bush lost the election.

And this has been the pattern to this day.  Obama offered a great benefit, universal health care, and won by large margins.  Those margins would probably been even higher if he’d actually gotten something like Medicare for All, a low cost, high benefit plan.  However, what he created wound up not seeming like a really great benefit to a wide swath of Middle America and because of this, many “Blue” states voted for Trump.  But, as Obamacare was a huge benefit to Millennials, women and minorities, they maintained strong support for the Democrats, because they got the most benefit from the administration.  Groups that got less resumed the pattern of voting for tax cuts that they felt would be an immediate benefit.

So basically, in order to win on National, State, or even Local levels, each party much present a package of goodies that can win voters.  This election, the Democrats didn’t do a great job of selling their package, while Trump, with simplistic language, grabbed the package and promoted it.

I know this seems very base, and crass, but this ultimately is how government in a Democracy works.  You have to promise to reward a large group of people with something you can deliver on.  And then you have to do it.  If Trump succeeds in delivering his promises, he will easily win a second term.  If he does not, either through Democratic opposition, or simply the workings of reality, he will be booted from the White House.  And given his baggage, he might even be booted before 4 years are up.  He made huge promises, and, if he wants to keep his position, he’d better deliver.

The American People are very unforgiving of failure to perform.

Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing?

Post Mortem

The general consensus after the 2012 election is that it was a status quo election; the President remains the same, and both houses of Congress are still in the hands of the same parties that controlled them before the election, albeit with modest gains for the Democrats.

But the surface read does not really reflect the earth shattering implications of this election.  Some of these have been discussed (and dismissed to the peril of the groups dismissing them) and others have not been addressed by the mainstream.

First, this election proved the power of the changing demographics of the country.  Latinos, Blacks, LGBT, Women and Youth swung this election.  The reign of Old White Men is effectively over; and the politics of Racism will no longer win any statewide or national election.  They may still hold sway on the local and congressional district scale, but beyond them demographics will overwhelm racism.

Since the Civil Rights movement, the Republicans have built electoral strength on the power of White Outrage.  The messages were not even remotely coded at first, but until this election they were increasingly subtle.  Right wing pundits in this election pulled off that cloak and showed the white robes that lay beneath.  In their certainty that this country was fundamentally a country that wanted leaders that looked like them.  They called President Obama some of most vile names I have ever heard in politics and in doing so, tried to paint him as a caricature of the worst stereotypes imaginable -- lazy, stupid, incompetent and so on.

It failed.

In fact, it motivated the people who are not Old White Men, and who do not agree with that vision of America, to get out the vote and fight for their side.  And as a result, this obscene rhetoric guaranteed that the Republicans have lost large swaths of the country for a generation, just like the Civil Right Movement cost the Democrats the South for at least two generations.  It guaranteed that the so-called minorities, which actually when aggregated are actually now the majority of Americans, have now turned their backs on the Republican Party. 

But it did something more.  The elections of 2008 and 2012 have shown these groups that they wield real power in this country.  Acting as a cohesive whole, they have the ability to effect real change in the United States.  One of the great shocks to the Right in this election was that minorities and young people turned out to vote in numbers comparable to the 20008 election, even though many were supposed to be disillusioned with the Obama message of hope and change.

The thing is, the Right underestimated what these groups learned in 2008, that they can have real power.  While the Right dismissed them and talked about "takers," self-deportation and legitimate rape, these groups set out to show them just how wrong they were.

And in doing so, the Democrats proved without a shadow of a doubt, that to be the President in this country you now have to be President for all types of Americans, not just a segment of favored elites.

But the deeper lesson here is not that these groups are reliably Democrats; both sides moving forward MUST address the needs of these constituents.  They have found their power and their voice, and they will not quietly do what they are told to do.  The future of both parties depends on becoming more diverse, more inclusive and more responsive to the people.  These groups will never again willingly give up their power.

The second lesson of this election follows the first; divisive conservative position on social issues will Trump a pure economic message.  (pun intended)  It is true that this election was the Republicans' to lose, mainly because our instant gratification society felt that President Obama should have solved the economic meltdown in his first hundred days.  Even though the Republicans offered nothing but a slight repackaging of the Bush policies, if they had remained focused on their economic message, they might have won.  This would have been because they would not have alienated women like they did.

Instead, they brought social conservatism front and center in the election, and in doing so failed to recognize that the country is getting more secular, and more liberal, on these issues.   A majority of people under 50 no longer care what you do in your private life, and respect your ability to make decisions in regard to your body, you sex life and your overall personal happiness.  The more the Right clings to their rigid ideas on these issues, and tries to mandate how people handle their private lives, the more marginalized that they will become. 

The take-away here is that both parties moving forward need to articulate a vision for this country that is based in economic directions, foreign policies, and building a strong and unified nation.  No one wants to talk about these divisive issues.  One of the reasons the President won a second term was he continued to talk about America as a whole, not as a 47% solution.  I don't think anyone will ever again win a national election by setting one group in this country against another.

The next lesson, math rules.  Statistics have been incontrovertibly proven to hammer gut feelings.  When aggregated, polls are not skewed and facts do not have a political bias.

This is a hard one for Republicans to stomach this election.  They were so convinced that the polling was part of a liberal plot to suppress the truth that Romney did not even write a concession speech.  They created a fantasy world to justify their feelings that there was no way that "their" America would re-elect President Obama.  And when that delusional edifice came crashing in on them election night, it sent them into a spiral of despair.

However, I am not gloating here, the Democrats could just have easily been deluded, and in fact many of them were.  The pundits on the left did not use any epistemology for their positions either, except for the handful kept quoting Nate Silver.  And in the next election, if the models predict a Republican win, I wonder if the Democrats will bend themselves into intellectual pretzels like the Republicans did this year.

I personally did not out as much faith in him as I should have, partially for fear of dirty tricks like we saw in 2000 and the potential for them from groups like True the Vote, but more because he had only used his model for one Presidential election.  I just was not certain the mathematical model would hold true.  It did, and it did with stunning accuracy, and from this point forward, I will put my faith in the math.

Ultimately, I am not sure that this will end the reign of the Chattering Class, who sit and talk about how their side is certain to win, based on gut feelings and tea leaves, but I suspect that in the next election we will see more substantive discussion and less spin.  For certain, in the next election, people will have less faith in talking heads offering opinions with no facts or hard numbers to back them up.

  

The final major lesson of this election is that elective office is not for sale.  Money alone does not substitute for vision, nor can it buy an election.  Further, a few free-spending billionaires cannot dictate the direction of the country.  This is still a government for the people, by the people.

I did not actually think this would be the result.  I, like many Democrats, thought that Citizen's United was the end of democracy in America.  I was certain the Koch Brothers promise to purchase every second of advertising in the week running up to the election would transform the outcome. 

Instead, all of their money had the opposite effect, it motivated the Democrats, who knew that their had to have an impeccable ground game to combat the tsunami of cash flooding them.  And as a result, the Billionaire Band of Brothers got precisely as much good from their money as they would have gotten by flushing down the toilet.

And in the end, this result may have made Citizen's United the most overrated decision in Supreme Court history.  That isn't to say that it isn't a horrible ruling that must overturned soon, it just that it probably won't turn the United States into an Oligarchy.  And on that note, I feel like, for the moment at least, our Republic will be preserved.

The reason is, that I doubt that the wealthy will pony up next election like they did this election.  They did not get to be that wealthy by dumping hundreds of millions of dollars into lost causes.  They expect results for their money, and if they don't get them, they are going to be more resistant to dumping cash the next time around.

And there is an added pickup here, I think this debacle spells the end of the reign of Karl Rove; he has truly earned the nickname "Turd Blossom."  I just wonder if he will mysteriously disappear, just like the unfortunates who crossed the mob in the old days.  In any case, his reputation and power is pretty much finished at this point.

On another plus, all the cash that the Right dumped into this election will actually have a stimulative effect.  One of the problems with the Bush Tax Cuts, according to the CBO, is that the super wealthy typically do not inject as much money into the economy as the Middle Class.  All the money that was dumped into the media is now flowing around the economy.  The people who fought tooth and nail against the Stimulus Bill just did their own stimulus program.

Irony, your name is American Politics.

Embracing the Paradox: Totalitarian Democracy

Soviet Style

It may surprise you to know that Joseph Stalin was the democratically elected leader of the Soviet Union.  So were Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Gorbachev.   In fact, every leader, at every level in the U.S.S.R. was elected to their office.  The Soviet constitution clearly spells out that the country is a Democratic Republic, just like the United States.  Everyone in that country had the right to vote for their leaders, just like we do.

Except for one thing, there was only one person to vote for.

There might be an opponent in an election, but everyone knew who they had to vote for; their very lives depended on it.  In some cases quite literally, as Siberia is not a place to try to raise a family.  Because of this, people would march to the polls and vote for the person that they were told to vote for.  And the government had ways of tracking the objectors, so sitting out the vote wasn't an option either.

Consequently, the Soviet leadership was typically elected with over ninety percent of the popular vote, and elections had near to one hundred percent participation.  The ruling class was elected because the people were told who to vote for in a "free" election.

This phenomenon could be termed "Totalitarian Democracy."  It is a paper democracy, where the reality is that a totalitarian government controls the outcome of all elections through fear and ruthlessness.  We would not consider this to be a true democracy, but in many parts of the world, this is what passes for an electoral system.  In fact, most of the world's "democracies" function this way.  You see it in countries as varied as Iran, on the religious end, to Venezuela, on the neo-communist side.  For the most part, only the European, North American, Indian and British Commonwealth countries follow the model we think of as Democracy.

But the new embrace of Totalitarian Democracy by the Republican Party, puts this country one step closer to that other "Democracy." 

Specifically, I am talking about what happened in Tampa to the supporters of Ron Paul.  They were shut out of the convention, some of them stripped of their credentials, and their entire movement blocked from ever happening again.  They have changed the rules to block any future insurgent or grassroots candidate from ever daring to threaten the lockstep march that they expect from their delegates, binding them to vote for whoever got the majority of votes in the state. 

I understand that faithless electors can be a potential problem, and I am terrified that in a close election, there might be some in the Electoral College.  That said, party conventions are a way to make sure that the voices of all constituents are heard, and delegates are in a unique position to put pressure on the party to make sure it happens.  Besides, what if we had found out a week ago that Romney did actually commit a felony on his taxes, wouldn't the party want a last chance to derail his nomination?  With this new rule, that couldn't happen.

I do want to say here, I am not a Ron Paul supporter.  I agree with what my mentor Joe said about him, "He is correct with about 80% of what he says, but he is so horribly wrong about the other 20% that he can never be allowed to lead this country."   Actually I think it might be closer to 50/50, but you get the point.

That said, he started a brilliant grassroots effort in the Republican Party.  He fired up his supporters in the way that Obama fired up those of us on the Left.  He inspired genuine passion in his followers, and although I would never want to live in his America, I truly respect his love of country.  I just don't agree with it, but I do respect it.

This is more than the Republican Party will give him.

For right or wrong, he is the spiritual father of the Tea Party that has swept the Far Right, and that movement rolled the Republicans into office across the country in 2010.  And now, his insurgency has been put down, and he is being shoved to the side.

My example of Stalin and the Soviet Union was deliberate; Ron Paul is Lenin to Romney's Stalin. (And I love the irony of comparing Lenin to Ron Paul.)  Lenin inspired the Russian Revolution, set out it's principles, formed the ideological backbone of the country, and lived just long enough to see Stalin begin to destroy everything he had tried to build.  The Soviets paid homage to Lenin, worshiped at his tomb, but abandoned the core of his work.  He became a veneer for a brutal totalitarian regime that was no different at it's heart than the Tsars that it replaced.

Ron Paul promoted the idea of a true libertarian Utopia: or Dystopia, depending on your view.  He fired up his supporters to get them to try to institute it, only to watch as the Republican Party co-opted it, and turned it inside out to use as a weapon for a new Inner Party Oligarchy.  Instead of a true free market, they want a gamed system that supports the Mega-Corps over everyone else.  Instead of a true limited government, they want to take government out of your lives and put it back in the bedroom where it belongs.  Instead of an almost non-existent military presence outside of this country, they embrace the rolling war machine of interventionist foreign policy.

In other words, they hold the man up as an Icon for their movement, just like Lenin, but destroy everything that he stands for.

And then, just like the Great Purge of the Soviets, they eradicate all of his supporters, and exile them to a political Siberia where they have no voice and cannot rise up against the hegemony.  The Republicans have already purged the White Russians, the Moderates, and now they are turning against their own, the Reds, the Libertarians.  In this model, I wonder who will be Trotsky and Zinoviev.

But unfortunately, this comparison goes even further than the inner party purges of the Soviets.  They got the rest of their country to go along with the single party rule, through intimidation, propaganda, criminality and outright buying of the vote, much like you see the Republicans doing today.  They got people to understand that if they did not vote the "right" way, they could forget about having a good life, either individually or collectively.

We see this today in the United States.  Voter Purges, I.D. laws and other voter suppression tactics are aimed at intimidating people so that they will not vote.  Lies echo across all of the media, both in ads and in the solemn pronouncements of supposedly "independent" new agencies.  Federal voting laws are trashed, and there is a high possibility of voter fraud with the electronic voting machines that are not secure.  And to top it off, the Billionaire Set has said that is no limit to the amount of money that they will spend to get the election results that they want.

More frightening that this, however, is the Soviet way that they are getting people to vote against their own best interests.  Long gone are the days when a few wedge issues would get the middle and lower class voters to turn against things that would make their lives better.  That is still a tactic in use, but now preachers and bosses just tell people who to vote for.

Their not subtle message is, if you don't vote the way I want you to, you will be excommunicated, you will lose your job.  The Pope has thrown two thousand years of Christian Charity out the window, saying that abortion and homosexuality are to drive your votes.  Never mind that the Republican budget goes completely against the actual message of Jesus; a good Catholic must vote the straight pro-life ballot.  (And ignore the little bit about Capital Punishment, even though that is part of Pro-Life, they're really only concerned about Fetuses.) 

As an incentive to make sure that people vote the Right way, the Catholic Church says that it will deny communion, a central sacrament, to anyone who ever votes Pro-Choice.  If you know what is good for you, and you want to remain in your church, you'd better vote the way the church tells you to, even if it goes against your own conscience.

Similarly, employers do the same thing.  Generally, they are less blatant about it, although there have been instances where this is not the case, but still they make it known who they want you to vote for.  A simple statement like "if the Democrats win this fall, we may have to reconsider the size of our workforce," will guarantee a number of people voting a particular way.  In this case, they vote against their overall self interest, to satisfy a very narrow self interest of not being unemployed.

I do want to make clear, this is not the full Soviet Totalitarian Democracy, where they check to make sure that you have voted the correct way.  It is more on the order of an extreme form of peer pressure, coupled with intimidation and suppression,  but it might work.  Remember, all that is needed is fifty percent plus one vote.  Every vote turned through these tactics means that the Democrats need to get two; one to cancel out the turned vote, and one to trump it.

This is how the system works, and all you have to do is look around the world to realize that the "Other Democracy" is actually the more common one.  Today, it is the Ron Paul Libertarian Republicans that have been shut out, tomorrow it could be everyone else in the country.

I am reminded of what Ben Franklin said when asked what kind of government the new United States would have.  His reply was, "A democracy, if you can keep it."

We need to make sure that we keep it.