The Blog

2020-

2020-12-03 e
"With the federal bureaucracy fully woke, the media and social media in compliance with the incoming administration, and the alumni of our progressive law schools being shunted into the federal judiciary as fast as confirmation proceedings will allow, things will get worse fast, with even milquetoast civic nationalist conservative types being canceled."

Dissecting a Dirty Election

Now that the votes are counted, however crookedly that may be, only the autopsy remains

My strongest impression from the United States’ 2020 general election is that the process by which we record and count votes is an unholy mess, wide open to fraud. Counting was suspended for hours without explanation; great tranches of mail-in votes appeared out of nowhere; vote monitors were denied access; and the counting process continued for days. We are a First World nation with a Third World voting system.

In fact this may even be a slight on the Third World. India, which has four times our population but only one-eighth our per capita GDP, with vast regional differences in language and religion, held a general election last year. The final tallying of the 614 million votes cast began at 8 a.m. on May 23; results followed just hours later.

“Voting systems,” I should have said, in the plural, since the methods of recording and counting American votes vary from state to state, as prescribed by Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof …

Voting for the president is less direct, being mediated by the Electoral College. But here again, the appointment of electors by a state is to be carried out “in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.”

Creating some degree of uniformity in the voting process would greatly improve confidence in the validity of our elections. The Constitution makes suitable provision, as Article I, Section 4 adds “but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations….”

Does that power also encompass state laws directing the appointment of electors to the Electoral College? That’s not clear—not to me at any rate—but it darn well ought to. We need clear and uniform rules nationwide for collecting and counting votes.

Australia, although a constitutional monarchy, has a federal structure not unlike our own. Elections there are supervised by the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), a federal body. All registered candidates can nominate “scrutineers” to be present throughout the polling and counting processes at every voting place. Voting is compulsory, with fines for defaulters. Absentee voting is strictly limited; and the limits have not been much affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

We don’t have to adopt all of Australia’s rules, but Australia does show us that a federal nation is quite capable of operating a system cleaner, more efficient, and far less prone to manipulation than our own. Congress should exercise its constitutional powers to federalize our elections.

I am of course building castles in the air. Nothing will be done to federalize our voting systems, or to improve them in any way. Attempts to apply even very elementary safeguards will be fiercely resisted by legislators.

... With that off my chest, the question remains: How will this election affect our lives, our fortunes, and our national politics?

There are still uncertainties as I write, days after the vote, but I shall assume the most probable result: Biden as president, Republicans just barely holding the Senate, and Democrats maintaining control of the House, but with a reduced majority.

Given that likely outcome, here are some predictions for the near future.

First, in the category of war, there is a high probability—I would put it north of 90 percent—that China will attack Taiwan at some point in the next four years. Bringing the Taiwanese—against their will, of course —back into the warm embrace of the motherland is a key goal of China’s leaders. They have been holding back through the duration of the Trump presidency because of his open hostility towards them, and because Trump, perhaps unconsciously, has followed Nixon’s let-’em-think-you’re-crazy style of psychological war.

The Chinese fear Trump. They don’t fear Biden. Instead they view him as feeble and non-hostile, and, as suggested by recent revelations about his family’s business dealings, they may have kompromat on him. This being China, it would be called qiāozhà xìnxī. As Biden’s poll numbers rose in the weeks prior to the election, China’s provocations against Taiwan rose in sync.

... Secondly, there remains the open question about what will happen to Trumpism with Donald out of office. The great revelation of 2016 was that the policies of the institutional Republican Party towards the world beyond our shores —brilliantly encapsulated in Steve Sailer’s phrase “invade the world, invite the world”—were unpopular with Republican voters. Sixteen institutional Republicans stood in their party’s primaries that year: Trump beat them all by promising to leave foreigners alone when they do not impinge directly on our interests, and to practice strict border control at home.

... Finally, the thing to be feared most from a Biden presidency is the intensification of our state ideology, with its corresponding loss of liberty.

I doubt that Biden himself is much of a metaphysician, but he has learned to parrot the cant language of the “woke.” On the campaign trail back in July he was already telling voters he had a plan to tackle “systemic racism”—the invisible gas or luminiferous æther that supposedly prevents the educational and social achievements of black Americans from equalling those of nonblacks, despite decades of massive institutional favoritism awarded to blacks through affirmative action and other governmental, educational, and corporate programs.

Biden himself may not be “woke” in any sincere way, but he has cabinet positions to fill, and posts in the bureaucracy and judiciary. The résumés are coming in, many of course from Obama administration stalwarts. (read more)

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