Instead of asking 'who should rule?', we should only be asking 'how do we best remove bad leaders without violence?'
--Karl Popper.
The US constitution did not intend to establish a democracy, but a republic based on the principle eloquently expressed by Karl Popper above. The over-reaction to "Orange Hitler" was truly bizarre and extreme. Trump is not an authoritarian by any means, and he sought the presidency simply hoping to fix economic issues and bad business practices which he believed were not in America's interests.
To characterize the shenanigans in the 2020 presidential election as mere irregularities is a vast understatement. There is a mountain of evidence showing that it was most irregular indeed. Trump's refusal to concede was certainly an evil for the reasons you have outlined above, but given the nature of the election, it remains a serious question as to whether it was the greater or lesser evil.
The entrenched left is not a local but a global problem. We have seen them become precipitously more authoritarian, more extreme, more evil, and quite frankly, more unhinged. If the world is to fall into brutal, democidal, totalitarianism again, it will come from the left, not from Trump and his supporters.
To paraphrase Winston Churchill, Trump is absolutely the worst candidate for president - except for everybody else! Maybe he will go into the role this time (assuming he is permitted) with his eyes open, with better advisors, and restore the USA to something more like a constitutional republic. Even if he bumbles this, he remains by far the lesser of two evils.
"President Trump did not like the way that the 2020 election turned out. If he were a decent person and a statesman, he would have put the interests of the country first. He would have conceded the election. To deal with concerns about election irregularities, he would have appointed a bipartisan commission to examine election procedures and propose remedies for future elections. Instead, he showed an unwillingness to accept the outcome."
How does the former president, decent or otherwise, appoint a bipartisan commission to examine anything? I realize that you, like many academics, don't want to sully your hands on this issue, but there were glaring irregularities in the last election, and as important as the peaceful transition of power is also the honest transition of power and authority. What you prescribe makes no sense.
(Worth reading in full -- "[O]ur review reveals that the interpretations of the election data, which suggest massive fraud, are based on invalid statistical or illogical reasoning" and "By discussing statistical fallacies in a nontechnical manner, we aim to make our critiques accessible to a broad, nonspecialist audience")
I never said anything about massive fraud, nor am I absolutely confident that election fraud occurred. To tone it down slightly, I might say there was the appearance of impropriety, such as statewide election counts that stopped for no explicable reason.
And, we could probably agree that the party that wins an election is not going to want to investigate the election they just won. That would apply to both parties.
This is a problem, not for Trump, but for all of us.
In my county, in their eagerness to "get out the vote" - not sure why that's become a legitimate government function - and take advantage of the pandemic to make permanent changes to people's ideas about voting, they sent out so many at-home voter packets, so early, by the time of the election, some discrepancy was in play. I can't remember exactly. There was an error affecting some percentage of people, which made the news, so it brought out all the newswatching oldsters, convinced it involved them. There was also, I recall, an issue where the state and the county did not get their ballots out successfully in tandem. I've forgotten all the details, mercifully - but the upshot was - a whole lot of people showed up at the polls having partially or wholly voted by mail, and then were permitted to vote again - "provisionally", if the system said they'd already voted - and the uses to which such confusion might lend themselves are obvious.
In short, all the changes around voting - seem obviously to make it more complex, less robust. And questionable from another point of view: we had *3 weeks of early voting* the last time I worked doing that. You have people voting before all the debates have even been held.
My mother loves to absentee vote (for no valid reason except for her claim to want to read and think about the ballot carefully; these are people who go to the grocery store three times a day) and I recall one year she voted so early her primary candidate (I think it was Jeb Bush) dropped out before election day.
And I will say, I think the vast majority of people, if asked in a neutral, non-dumb-partisan way, the ideal method for conducting a presidential election - would say, one day to vote. Everybody who wants to, turns out. Employers required to let people go vote. Period.
There's also, a whole subset of people - not small - who love voting - Boomers mostly - *so much* that they can't resist requesting a mail-in ballot. What's more fun than that? A present in the mail! Voting on the couch! But the thing is, when election day rolls around, or even during early voting, they see the news coverage, and the lines, and they both panic and get excited. They want to be part of that! What were they thinking! Now they worry, where did their ballot go, when they mailed it? Will it "count"?
Or maybe they didn't fill it out. There's a process for that. You're supposed to bring it to the poll, hand it in. Then vote. More paperwork. More stuff to keep track of.
Or they go, and say they don't have it, never got it (I remember once the daughter of the oldster was mouthing to me, it's on the kitchen table, with the mail. But we don't call people liars).
I think in that case they signed an affidavit swearing they would not mail it in, if they "found it".
Either way they go to the polls! They can't help it. They want to use the machine and all. Really feel they voted.
Since feelings are everything in our culture, I expect in time they will be allowed to vote as many times as they like. There will be a process in order to deal with this. This process will mysteriously have the effect of lengthening the amount of time it takes for the country to learn who won the election.
Why is "get out the vote" or more generally increase the proportion of people who vote a good idea / legitimate public interest?
I'd say from first principles -- our system of government draws legitimacy from the consent of the governed, and the higher the proportion of citizens who give consent the better off we are. And studies show early voting and other such measures increase turnout. See for example: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.20180192
On the subject of fraud/complexity/longer times to determine legitimate votes/longer times to tally votes/etc. -- its the same rules for everyone involved.
Theres equal opportunity for fraud on all sides -- i.e. one side does not have an inherent advantage. There are states with high mail vote where the republican candidate won (https://www.ncsbe.gov/results-data/voter-turnout/2020-general-election-turnout) -- like North Carolina and Florida, and some where the democratic candidate won -- like Pennsylvania. All sides have equal opportunity to "get the vote out" / make it easier for their voters to vote / etc.
Second: it is plain to everyone that technology should have made vote-counting faster than it used to be. People had to tabulate paper ballots!
And yet - we used to wake up the next day or by the evening paper and know who the president was going to be. Was that *only* because all the elections were more lopsided ....?
Has the "liberalization" of voting procedures, times, methods somehow made things more competitive (why?) - more polarized? Have they permitted somehow, party machines to fine-tune the vote in some way? Like, they know the totals of early voting each day by various precincts. Is that good information to supply?
Have these changes around voting with the curiously unexpected - given technology - change that Mexico seems to handle a presidential election with greater transparency and simplicity than the US does - made people more trusting of the result? Is it good to trust the result? Or does that not matter? If Democrats didn't trust the result, would the reaction be different?
Or is that too part of the design? If you evince doubt about these things, and this paradox - is that a way to mark you out as someone whose vote, we really don't want to get out?
> If Democrats didn't trust the result, would the reaction be different?
I'm old enough to recall most of the details from the 2000 election :)
Rank and file democrats were up in arms over the Supreme Court halting the vote count in Broward, reversing the state court's verdict. Here is how Vice President Gore reacted:
"Neither he nor I anticipated this long and difficult road. Certainly neither of us wanted it to happen. Yet it came, and now it has ended, resolved, as it must be resolved, through the honored institutions of our democracy."
and further "Now the U.S. Supreme Court has spoken. Let there be no doubt, while I strongly disagree with the court's decision, I accept it. I accept the finality of this outcome, which will be ratified next Monday in the Electoral College. And tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession."
This is how one protects and defends the institutions of democracy.
Al Gore (and Bill Clinton!) had more than sufficient rhetorical powers to summon a crowd and instigate violence at the Capitol. And to lead a years long agitation that the election was rigged. It is quite clear who acted to protect the fabric of democracy and who to tear it.
Let's say there are principled differences about the rallying of people to vote - differences based upon, for instance, a doubt that stirring up people to be *more political* than they would naturally be, is wise - or a doubt about the role of the "currently-governing" with their civil service army, to seek to influence, outside of party, the propensity of different types of people to vote, when those votes are essentially known in advance. (E.g. it is now commonplace for non-English-speakers/readers to vote, and I'm sure this is legal, but is it inherently desirable to increase the number of people who cannot vote unaided?)
There would then be an obvious advantage to one side of this philosophical divide. A permanent advantage.
These are legitimate concerns, although we have come a great distance away from "the 2020 election was stolen/illegitimate/somehow untrustworthy/appearance of fraud/the certification of the vote by Congress needs to be stopped" etc.
All your concerns can be addressed by boring good old democratic methods. I'd say "get the vote out" to get more people to see the wisdom of your ways ;)
There absolutely were explicable reasons. This was predicted *before* the election because several states passed laws preventing the counting of absentee ballots prior to election day.
Compare this to Florida, which after the 2000 debacle changed its laws to start counting ballots as soon as they came in. They were able to get results in just a few hours.
People like Trump excel at creating doubt. He spent all of 2020 saying it was going to be rigged (and the fall of 2016 for that matter).
BTW, I just looked at the articles you linked and all I can say is "wow, either you're an idiot, or you think we are".
The Grofman and Cervas paper plays statistical games to make the statistical irregularities go away, BTW, statistical irregularities are by no means the only evidence.
The Brookings institute article barely even bothers to look at the evidence.
He did set up a commission, but it was prevented from finding anything out or getting anything done. One of the first things Trump did as President was set up PACEI. I know Kobach has been declared an enemy agent or whatever, but if you believe his account, or just the records of the commission getting requests denied over and over by every blue government, they weren't able to find evidence because they weren't allowed to access the evidence. That kind of intentional withholding of information needed for investigation and discovery is called "obstruction of justice" and "spoiliation of evidence" and the rule in court is that it allows the finder of fact to infer enough extra liklihood of violation such as to flip the presumption to being against the accused, as they are in the best position to rebut the inference by providing the evidence proving the contrary, and the need to rebut provides innocent custodians of evidence with the proper incentive to maintain it.
Instead, what you see from all the bogus and slanted reporting on what actually went down at PACEI was to pretend it was valid to reverse the spoiliation inference rule and to claim that being refused access such that you can get "no evidence that" something happened is evidence that it never happened. Which, duh, it's not, it's the opposite - just as the court rules say - evidence that makes it more likely it DID happen.
PACEI closed shop because it became clear it was successfully neutralized without cooperation, judicial top cover, and subpoena power derived from legislation, and the attempt to get such legislation was futile as dead on arrival, opposed by leaders of both parties, because some Republican Members of Congress owe their jobs to the ability of local officials to play similar games in red states.
Yes, it was a Yuge mistake for Trump to fail to recognize (and listen to Kobach) that this was a potentially existential- level issue for him and thus to not hold the functioning of the government hostage until federal election requirements were made uniform at the highest standards with universal access to video recordings of everything, everywhere. Not just of officials, but of every voter holding up their ID and especially when signing some absentee ballot, all of which is technologically and economically trivial to do.
The American election system is a complete joke compared to how it's done in every other developed country, and keeping it decentralized and intentionally kept vulnerable to all kinds of mischief which one can hide by costlessly denying access to evidence is an outrage. American officials acting as election observers in another country and seeing the same things happen abroad would refuse to certify it as a free and fair election.
Saying that any politician faced with some reasonably strong indicators of major fraud is ethically obligated to throw up his hands and let cheaters get away with stealing the election is a recipe for more and perpetual cheating. Note, I think Trump would have lost in 2020 without any cheating, but that there was also plenty of cheating to his disadvantage. Trump also went way too far in attempting to win despite the reported vote results - mostly because he was raking in a fortune from impassioned small donors - but it wasn't unreasonable or unethical for him and his campaign team to take the first 10% or so of the steps they did to challenge those results.
Cheating didn't benefit Trump. I have heard rumors that some Republican congressmen in swing districts in red states get some benefit from "red cheating" enabled by red local officials participating in similar kinds of local mischief and dirty tricks. If any of that is true - I don't know - then there are swing districts districts in states that were already safely for Trump, so in those circumstances help to a local politician wouldn't make any difference in the Presidential race.
My position is that it's naive to expect parties to do anything less than they can get away with, and the people who could significantly improve the election system by making it much harder than it currently is to get away with lots of cheating are suspiciously stubborn in their determination not to improve it.
We saw a similar thing with regards to standards for IDs in the aftermath of 9/11. State and local governments can decide how vulnerable their ID issuance process is to various kinds of fraud, and many of them knew full well their id systems were jokes and indeed wanted those vulnerabilities to persist for various political reasons because of a large population of holders of improperly-obtained IDs to which the states wanted to turn a blind eye but who would get caught up in a rapid tightening of standards. They told themselves that the national security risk that went along with this toleration of rampant fraud was too small to worry about, until you-know- who did you-know-what in part by them having found it so easy to break the rules to get ids good enough to get on airplanes.
So the 9/11 commission made the crazy suggestion that IDs should not be accepted as good enough to get on airplanes unless they were hard to fake and the minimum standards required to prove one's identity in order to obtain one were raised to a much higher level. With two fronts in the war on terror going, it still took about two years - and nearly four since the attacks - to pass the law requiring states to make better ID systems if they wanted those IDs to be accepted at airports and other federal locations.
After at least half a dozen delays, these mandates may actually go into effect in 2025 - two full decades after the law was passed - and even then, only because that allowed enough time for a kind of genius move in government identity-laundering, suspect identities come out clean. 20 years of steadfast resistance is not something honest and savvy people can excuse and reconcile with innocent explanations.
However reckless Trump might behave in an attempt to 'entrench' himself, it will still prove unequal to the power of the entrenched left, "the college-degreed elites who hold sway in academia, media, and government." to resist him. Or to put it another way - we no longer live (if we ever did) in a Democracy whose reality bears much relation to its rhetoric.
In the New Hampshire primary earlier this week, exit polls showed that most of the people voting for Nikki Haley were not registered Republicans, and the DNC reportedly raised and spent lots of money to game the system by getting Democrat voters to switch to undeclared so they could vote in the GOP primary. To paraphrase what Scott Adams has said multiple times in recent weeks, it would be possible to design an election system with safeguards against fraud and cheating, and the reason the existing system is designed to make it impossible to audit is that both parties want it that way. That's why, for all his faults, I find Scott Adams refreshing compared to the intellectual fantasy approach. It is not at all clear to me that the peaceful transfer of power is less likely under non-democratic systems. Kling's 'minimalist view' of democracy is equivalent to saying that we don't have a democracy in this country, and that is about the only thing that I agree with him on. We have an elite-based system, the main purpose of elections is to validate that system, and the reason why a peaceful transfer of power is at risk is that the main priorities of the elite (among them, funding an endless string of oversees wars that don't seem to advance our national security, which seems to be the main impetus behind Nikki Haley's candidacy) are increasingly at odds with the interests of a large chunk of the electorate.
Kling's main criticism of Trump is that he didn't accept the legitimacy of the 2020 election.
Kling's main criticism of Democrats is that they play dirty to win in elections and make no attempt to even pretend to care about holding legitimate elections or allowing the public to vote on anyone other than their preferred candidate.
Kling in the past acknowledged that the federal intelligence agencies meddled in the 2020 election and pressured major tech companies and major media companies to restrict circulation of news + discussion unfavorable to the election prospects of the Democratic Party. But Kling basically downplays this and says this doesn't warrant claims of illegitimacy.
McWhorter says, "let the civil war happen." wow... I can't help but lose respect for McWhorter.
Democrats ignore the constitution all the time (especially rulings related to the second amendment), that has never caused masses of people to turn against them.
Yeah, I don't share Arnold's confidence on that point. I think partisanship is strong enough in this day and age that either side is capable of provoking a real crisis.
Of course my even more fundamental disagreement is that I do not consider the "entrenched Leftists" as my enemies, but my deeply, deeply mistaken friends. I can imagine Warren, changing her mind and favoring a revenue-raising, deficit tax on personal incomes or AOC agreeing to send boatload of asylum claims case workers to the border, but not Josh Hawley agreeing to merit based immigration or Marco Rubio agreeing to a tax on net CO2 emissions.
Like many things in life, it is a spectrum. Some of them are reasonable people I just happen to disagree with, some I deem to be miseducated/misguided, others are just cynical apparatchiks who will parrot whatever views seem advantageous, and a few are malignant enough to trigger my inner totalitarian to envision shipping them off to a re-education camp somewhere in the Dakotas.
"refusing to abide by court decisions that block part of his agenda"
I don't know about that. There are a lot of things that courts and regulators have done that if the President defied it I would support the president. I very much get a "we are the philosopher kings that can do whatever we want" vibe from many of the things that such officials do. I don't see any constraining limit on their power, they basically regulate themselves.
"I wish that Republican voters would choose someone other than Mr. Trump"
Electing a RINO would be pointless.
DeSantis ran a terrible campaign and made some really dumb decisions (abortion). Quite frankly, its not even clear to me he wanted to be president all that much.
Look, it seems pointless for people not running to complain about the candidates. If Elon Musk wanted to get into politics he could have tried to become the GOP nominee. He didn't, you got to go with who shows up.
I could say the same on the other side. Biden got 65k people to write his name in on the ballot last night. If you don't like Biden, run. Those that have run nobody supports.
Absolutely! "Refusing to abide by court decisions ..." Only somebody in thrall to the judiciary - and to lawyers, remember, the worst people on earth - could say this so peremptorily, as if self-evident.
It depends on whether the court decisions are truly lawful, or whether they are partisan and arbitrary. One can respect the law, and the rule of law, without identifying that with the will of the judiciary, especially if they are violating the spirit of the law by engaging in lawfare and judicial activism.
If an election is not free and fair, it is stolen. Censoring the bad truth about one candidate gives that candidate an unfair advantage—if he wins, the loser is right to claim it was unfair, and thus stolen.
Kling, nor McWhorter, accept this principle. They are wrong. 2020 was stolen, 2016 was not.
BUT there was a 2 year Russia Collusion smear campaign against Trump, with a dishonest Mueller investigation because of the principle that misinformation can make an election unfair.
Censoring H Biden’s laptop, and smoking gun evidence of Biden corruption, was illegal election interference to steal the election, enabled by an FBI that knew it was really Biden’s, and knew it had details of illegal corruption.
Trump instigated a Stop The Steal huge, peaceful protest, wanting Pence to select other electors. No insurrection. There was some violence, but the only armed people in the Capitol were cops, and the one shot was shot by a cop. Only the delusional, of which there many, call it an insurrection—none have been indicted for insurrection, much less been convicted. Tho there are still some hundred political prisoners in jail, with no speedy trial.
I believe the FBI had assets in the crowd and incited the crowd’s push into the building, thru a deliberately undermanned crowd control police presence. Kling probably believes no US deep state folk were inciting violence.
In Sept. There was an attempt to kidnap MI Governor Whitmer—enabled and incited by the FBI.
Despite 3 years of investigation, the public still doesn’t know who the J6 FBI assets, maybe agents but maybe not, were. The first 2 years were a shameful kangaroo court of half-truths, with lots of video known but not shown.
A man who loves America, and believes the election was stolen, should continue calling it stolen until proven otherwise. All Americans should be outraged by the failure to have free, fair, voter ID confirmed elections, like most civilized democracies have.
But as mentioned, we don’t become the elected politicians don’t really want them. Florida has them, so it’s clearly possible.
Loury on McWhorter's Trump Derangement Syndrome and being a good smart and reasonable guy except for his obsessive and exaggerated negativity towards one particular individual reminded me of that quote from Andre The Giant, "I don't like to speak badly of people. I have grown up thinking and being told that if you cannot say something nice about someone, you should not say anything at all. But I must break that rule in this case because I hate Hulk Hogan very much. He is a big ugly goon and I want to squash his face."
There are two versions of TDS: the first in which people froth at the mouth at the mention of his name, and the second in which people buy into his very bad con and believe that he is in it for anything other than himself.
Elite status people with extreme talent to be "Stirrers of Passions" and with dark-triad personality profiles provoke both love (hero champion) and hate (tyrant enemy) but rarely calm and sober indifference. That's from lower people looking up. When it's higher people looking down, it's more like Don Draper, "I don't think about you at all."
There are two separate questions. First, is the Colorado Supreme Court's decision legally correct? And two, even if it is legally correct, should the Colorado Supreme Court have kept Trump on the ballot anyway because of "democracy?"
Arnold's post addresses the second question but not the first. I don't think you can answer the second question until you have answered the first question.
To show my cards: I don't think you can credibly argue that Trump "engaged" in an "insurrection" so the decision is wrong on the merits. I agree with Arnold's skepticism toward democracy, so if the decision were correct I would be fine with Trump being kept off the ballot. But bceause the decision was wrong, it needs to be reversed.
Trump is tiresome, to be sure. Also tiresome is the atmosphere that springs up around him, maybe more so. I (like many?) hoped the various prosecutions would have fulfilled their intended purpose and he'd be out of the picture. At the very least surely none of us look forward to Groundhog Day for four years of our lives. The idea feels weird; it probably should. Who said the collapse of a country should be orderly and an era of good feelings?
I was basically hoping Desantis would take off. He has a kinda goofy, earnest, preternaturally youthful quality that puts me in mind of Beto O'Rourke but I was hoping the nation wouldn't notice/care. Why should it? The nation too has changed and is goofy/permanently jejune.
But this talk of tyrants feels like a deflection. (My default assumption is that whatever is most talked about, is our least danger.)
Simply, I don't know who's running the country right now. I know it is not Biden. Democrats openly joke about that as well. But strangely, there is no name. There would have been, in the quite recent past. The press would have known, we all probably would have known.
With Trump - well, he can't keep a staff longer than a few months. Strange as it may seem, the Wizard was calling the shots. Or insofar as he could without obstruction from e.g. the military or the judiciary.
So a vote for Biden is a vote for a peaceful continuation of power, sure - who that power is, is a mystery. Is this any problem for the cherished notion of democracy? I suppose not. But we're allowed to think about it.
For me it comes down to this: We are faced with a binary decision. One of two unattractive candidates will win. Which is the lesser of two evils? Put another way: Which of the two will put us the least distance down the road to autocracy during their term? Agony and distress at our situation should not eclipse prudence and common sense in the eternal and often unattractive struggle for preserving and advancing freedom.
Which road do we most want to avoid? I'm not sure how clear the choice is.
Let's take a worst-case assumption: Trump wins, the R's control both houses of Congress (with enough of a margin that they can do without the votes of those Republican legislators who haven't kissed Trump's ring). Trump now knows, as he didn't in 2017, that he needs to vet his appointees more carefully for single-minded loyalty to him (so, for instance, the Federalist Society's imprimatur for judicial appointments is no longer enough).
But Trump doesn't represent a political philosophy or program. All of his efforts will be bent toward broadening the power and glory of one Donald J. Trump. He'll still face resistance: from the Supreme Court, which he won't be able to pack with Trumpistas; from the Fourth Branch, dominated by what Dr. Kling calls the "entrenched left"; and from blue-state governors and legislators. And he'll be 78 years old when he takes the oath of office; the actuaries give him an expected lifespan of about 9 years. Even if he contrives to get around the 22nd Amendment, much of the evil that he did will be interred with his bones.
By contrast, Biden has shown that he's very much about expanding Federal entitlements and regulation. Even without control of both houses of Congress, he's shown himself amply willing to use his phone and pen to accomplish what Congress can't or won't give him. He'll have the enthusiastic support of the Fourth Branch. And the programs he's created or expanded will last long, long after he's laid beneath the sod, since it's impossible to kill an entitlement once established.
Trump may be worse for the cause of freedom during his remaining tenure on this globe of sin. But over the span of decades, a second Biden term, or a Biden-then-Harris term, might be worse for the cause of freedom.
Then the party in charge of all government departments and bureaucracies, which are busy making up regulations without consulting Congress, and can even enforce those rules using their own armed militias will definitively hold the balance of power. Elected politicians are just the tip of the governmental iceberg.
"President Trump did not like the way that the 2020 election turned out. If he were a decent person and a statesman, he would have put the interests of the country first." This is the crux of the matter. Previous elections were contested but the loser did concede (even the despised Hillary conceded) and this was on the basic premise of peaceful transfer of power and putting country over self, even if reluctantly. Trump is unable to do so. Some of Trump's advisors are already claiming that Democrats are working to "steal" the 2024 election! Yet here we are and the best that either party can put forth is either Biden (yuck) or Trump (barf). Pathetic.
Even the despised Hillary conceded, but then fake opposition research initially funded by her campaign became the basis for the Russia-Gate hoax that was used to stymy and subvert Trump's presidency. And she and her lackey's continued to rile up their gullible voters with ludicrous insinuations that Trump owed his election victory to Putin's intervention in our sacred democracy, rather than her odious personality and terrible campaign. Once that yarn was exhausted, Trump's phone call with the President of Ukraine was used to get him impeached.
Sometimes I get the feeling that the main reason both parties hate Trump so much is that he interrupted their plans to use Ukraine to wage war against Russia. Now they've got their war, and it's a race against time to get the cadaver reelected before the electorate notices that Russia is winning the war.
Conceding if you think you were cheated undermines your argument as it implies you didn't actually believe it but simply using it as a political machination. The same reason innocent people found guilty by a jury don't just up and say, to get a reduced sentence or make parole, "ok you got me, you're right, I was lying about my innocence and I'm in fact guilty". I've always applauded Trump for not conceding. I didn't vote for him the first time around but between that and Jan 6th, he has it plus a campaign donation this time.
Instead of asking 'who should rule?', we should only be asking 'how do we best remove bad leaders without violence?'
--Karl Popper.
The US constitution did not intend to establish a democracy, but a republic based on the principle eloquently expressed by Karl Popper above. The over-reaction to "Orange Hitler" was truly bizarre and extreme. Trump is not an authoritarian by any means, and he sought the presidency simply hoping to fix economic issues and bad business practices which he believed were not in America's interests.
To characterize the shenanigans in the 2020 presidential election as mere irregularities is a vast understatement. There is a mountain of evidence showing that it was most irregular indeed. Trump's refusal to concede was certainly an evil for the reasons you have outlined above, but given the nature of the election, it remains a serious question as to whether it was the greater or lesser evil.
The entrenched left is not a local but a global problem. We have seen them become precipitously more authoritarian, more extreme, more evil, and quite frankly, more unhinged. If the world is to fall into brutal, democidal, totalitarianism again, it will come from the left, not from Trump and his supporters.
To paraphrase Winston Churchill, Trump is absolutely the worst candidate for president - except for everybody else! Maybe he will go into the role this time (assuming he is permitted) with his eyes open, with better advisors, and restore the USA to something more like a constitutional republic. Even if he bumbles this, he remains by far the lesser of two evils.
"President Trump did not like the way that the 2020 election turned out. If he were a decent person and a statesman, he would have put the interests of the country first. He would have conceded the election. To deal with concerns about election irregularities, he would have appointed a bipartisan commission to examine election procedures and propose remedies for future elections. Instead, he showed an unwillingness to accept the outcome."
How does the former president, decent or otherwise, appoint a bipartisan commission to examine anything? I realize that you, like many academics, don't want to sully your hands on this issue, but there were glaring irregularities in the last election, and as important as the peaceful transition of power is also the honest transition of power and authority. What you prescribe makes no sense.
I think he meant during the period from November 2020 to January 2021 when Trump was still President.
Maybe so. The pace with which things happen in Washington, it is delusional to think it could happen in that window of time.
This may be more a case of you not wanting to sully your hands with evidence :)
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2103619118
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3794738
(Worth reading in full -- "[O]ur review reveals that the interpretations of the election data, which suggest massive fraud, are based on invalid statistical or illogical reasoning" and "By discussing statistical fallacies in a nontechnical manner, we aim to make our critiques accessible to a broad, nonspecialist audience")
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/widespread-election-fraud-claims-by-republicans-dont-match-the-evidence/
And hundreds more.
I never said anything about massive fraud, nor am I absolutely confident that election fraud occurred. To tone it down slightly, I might say there was the appearance of impropriety, such as statewide election counts that stopped for no explicable reason.
And, we could probably agree that the party that wins an election is not going to want to investigate the election they just won. That would apply to both parties.
This is a problem, not for Trump, but for all of us.
In my county, in their eagerness to "get out the vote" - not sure why that's become a legitimate government function - and take advantage of the pandemic to make permanent changes to people's ideas about voting, they sent out so many at-home voter packets, so early, by the time of the election, some discrepancy was in play. I can't remember exactly. There was an error affecting some percentage of people, which made the news, so it brought out all the newswatching oldsters, convinced it involved them. There was also, I recall, an issue where the state and the county did not get their ballots out successfully in tandem. I've forgotten all the details, mercifully - but the upshot was - a whole lot of people showed up at the polls having partially or wholly voted by mail, and then were permitted to vote again - "provisionally", if the system said they'd already voted - and the uses to which such confusion might lend themselves are obvious.
In short, all the changes around voting - seem obviously to make it more complex, less robust. And questionable from another point of view: we had *3 weeks of early voting* the last time I worked doing that. You have people voting before all the debates have even been held.
My mother loves to absentee vote (for no valid reason except for her claim to want to read and think about the ballot carefully; these are people who go to the grocery store three times a day) and I recall one year she voted so early her primary candidate (I think it was Jeb Bush) dropped out before election day.
And I will say, I think the vast majority of people, if asked in a neutral, non-dumb-partisan way, the ideal method for conducting a presidential election - would say, one day to vote. Everybody who wants to, turns out. Employers required to let people go vote. Period.
There's also, a whole subset of people - not small - who love voting - Boomers mostly - *so much* that they can't resist requesting a mail-in ballot. What's more fun than that? A present in the mail! Voting on the couch! But the thing is, when election day rolls around, or even during early voting, they see the news coverage, and the lines, and they both panic and get excited. They want to be part of that! What were they thinking! Now they worry, where did their ballot go, when they mailed it? Will it "count"?
Or maybe they didn't fill it out. There's a process for that. You're supposed to bring it to the poll, hand it in. Then vote. More paperwork. More stuff to keep track of.
Or they go, and say they don't have it, never got it (I remember once the daughter of the oldster was mouthing to me, it's on the kitchen table, with the mail. But we don't call people liars).
I think in that case they signed an affidavit swearing they would not mail it in, if they "found it".
Either way they go to the polls! They can't help it. They want to use the machine and all. Really feel they voted.
Since feelings are everything in our culture, I expect in time they will be allowed to vote as many times as they like. There will be a process in order to deal with this. This process will mysteriously have the effect of lengthening the amount of time it takes for the country to learn who won the election.
Why is "get out the vote" or more generally increase the proportion of people who vote a good idea / legitimate public interest?
I'd say from first principles -- our system of government draws legitimacy from the consent of the governed, and the higher the proportion of citizens who give consent the better off we are. And studies show early voting and other such measures increase turnout. See for example: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.20180192
On the subject of fraud/complexity/longer times to determine legitimate votes/longer times to tally votes/etc. -- its the same rules for everyone involved.
Theres equal opportunity for fraud on all sides -- i.e. one side does not have an inherent advantage. There are states with high mail vote where the republican candidate won (https://www.ncsbe.gov/results-data/voter-turnout/2020-general-election-turnout) -- like North Carolina and Florida, and some where the democratic candidate won -- like Pennsylvania. All sides have equal opportunity to "get the vote out" / make it easier for their voters to vote / etc.
Second: it is plain to everyone that technology should have made vote-counting faster than it used to be. People had to tabulate paper ballots!
And yet - we used to wake up the next day or by the evening paper and know who the president was going to be. Was that *only* because all the elections were more lopsided ....?
Has the "liberalization" of voting procedures, times, methods somehow made things more competitive (why?) - more polarized? Have they permitted somehow, party machines to fine-tune the vote in some way? Like, they know the totals of early voting each day by various precincts. Is that good information to supply?
Have these changes around voting with the curiously unexpected - given technology - change that Mexico seems to handle a presidential election with greater transparency and simplicity than the US does - made people more trusting of the result? Is it good to trust the result? Or does that not matter? If Democrats didn't trust the result, would the reaction be different?
Or is that too part of the design? If you evince doubt about these things, and this paradox - is that a way to mark you out as someone whose vote, we really don't want to get out?
> If Democrats didn't trust the result, would the reaction be different?
I'm old enough to recall most of the details from the 2000 election :)
Rank and file democrats were up in arms over the Supreme Court halting the vote count in Broward, reversing the state court's verdict. Here is how Vice President Gore reacted:
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/13/politics/text-of-goreacutes-concession-speech.html
"Neither he nor I anticipated this long and difficult road. Certainly neither of us wanted it to happen. Yet it came, and now it has ended, resolved, as it must be resolved, through the honored institutions of our democracy."
and further "Now the U.S. Supreme Court has spoken. Let there be no doubt, while I strongly disagree with the court's decision, I accept it. I accept the finality of this outcome, which will be ratified next Monday in the Electoral College. And tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession."
This is how one protects and defends the institutions of democracy.
Al Gore (and Bill Clinton!) had more than sufficient rhetorical powers to summon a crowd and instigate violence at the Capitol. And to lead a years long agitation that the election was rigged. It is quite clear who acted to protect the fabric of democracy and who to tear it.
Let's say there are principled differences about the rallying of people to vote - differences based upon, for instance, a doubt that stirring up people to be *more political* than they would naturally be, is wise - or a doubt about the role of the "currently-governing" with their civil service army, to seek to influence, outside of party, the propensity of different types of people to vote, when those votes are essentially known in advance. (E.g. it is now commonplace for non-English-speakers/readers to vote, and I'm sure this is legal, but is it inherently desirable to increase the number of people who cannot vote unaided?)
There would then be an obvious advantage to one side of this philosophical divide. A permanent advantage.
These are legitimate concerns, although we have come a great distance away from "the 2020 election was stolen/illegitimate/somehow untrustworthy/appearance of fraud/the certification of the vote by Congress needs to be stopped" etc.
All your concerns can be addressed by boring good old democratic methods. I'd say "get the vote out" to get more people to see the wisdom of your ways ;)
"no explicable reason"
There absolutely were explicable reasons. This was predicted *before* the election because several states passed laws preventing the counting of absentee ballots prior to election day.
Compare this to Florida, which after the 2000 debacle changed its laws to start counting ballots as soon as they came in. They were able to get results in just a few hours.
People like Trump excel at creating doubt. He spent all of 2020 saying it was going to be rigged (and the fall of 2016 for that matter).
> This was predicted *before* the election because several states passed laws preventing the counting of absentee ballots prior to election day.
And that explains why statewide counts suddenly stopped *on election day*?
Seriously, that is a complete nonsequitor.
Yes, let's look at the evidence, John C. Wright has provided a decent summery of the evidence here:
https://www.scifiwright.com/2024/01/summary-2020-presidential-election-fraud/
BTW, I just looked at the articles you linked and all I can say is "wow, either you're an idiot, or you think we are".
The Grofman and Cervas paper plays statistical games to make the statistical irregularities go away, BTW, statistical irregularities are by no means the only evidence.
The Brookings institute article barely even bothers to look at the evidence.
He did set up a commission, but it was prevented from finding anything out or getting anything done. One of the first things Trump did as President was set up PACEI. I know Kobach has been declared an enemy agent or whatever, but if you believe his account, or just the records of the commission getting requests denied over and over by every blue government, they weren't able to find evidence because they weren't allowed to access the evidence. That kind of intentional withholding of information needed for investigation and discovery is called "obstruction of justice" and "spoiliation of evidence" and the rule in court is that it allows the finder of fact to infer enough extra liklihood of violation such as to flip the presumption to being against the accused, as they are in the best position to rebut the inference by providing the evidence proving the contrary, and the need to rebut provides innocent custodians of evidence with the proper incentive to maintain it.
Instead, what you see from all the bogus and slanted reporting on what actually went down at PACEI was to pretend it was valid to reverse the spoiliation inference rule and to claim that being refused access such that you can get "no evidence that" something happened is evidence that it never happened. Which, duh, it's not, it's the opposite - just as the court rules say - evidence that makes it more likely it DID happen.
PACEI closed shop because it became clear it was successfully neutralized without cooperation, judicial top cover, and subpoena power derived from legislation, and the attempt to get such legislation was futile as dead on arrival, opposed by leaders of both parties, because some Republican Members of Congress owe their jobs to the ability of local officials to play similar games in red states.
Yes, it was a Yuge mistake for Trump to fail to recognize (and listen to Kobach) that this was a potentially existential- level issue for him and thus to not hold the functioning of the government hostage until federal election requirements were made uniform at the highest standards with universal access to video recordings of everything, everywhere. Not just of officials, but of every voter holding up their ID and especially when signing some absentee ballot, all of which is technologically and economically trivial to do.
The American election system is a complete joke compared to how it's done in every other developed country, and keeping it decentralized and intentionally kept vulnerable to all kinds of mischief which one can hide by costlessly denying access to evidence is an outrage. American officials acting as election observers in another country and seeing the same things happen abroad would refuse to certify it as a free and fair election.
Saying that any politician faced with some reasonably strong indicators of major fraud is ethically obligated to throw up his hands and let cheaters get away with stealing the election is a recipe for more and perpetual cheating. Note, I think Trump would have lost in 2020 without any cheating, but that there was also plenty of cheating to his disadvantage. Trump also went way too far in attempting to win despite the reported vote results - mostly because he was raking in a fortune from impassioned small donors - but it wasn't unreasonable or unethical for him and his campaign team to take the first 10% or so of the steps they did to challenge those results.
What cheating benefitted Trump in the 2020 election? I haven't heard that one before.
Cheating didn't benefit Trump. I have heard rumors that some Republican congressmen in swing districts in red states get some benefit from "red cheating" enabled by red local officials participating in similar kinds of local mischief and dirty tricks. If any of that is true - I don't know - then there are swing districts districts in states that were already safely for Trump, so in those circumstances help to a local politician wouldn't make any difference in the Presidential race.
My position is that it's naive to expect parties to do anything less than they can get away with, and the people who could significantly improve the election system by making it much harder than it currently is to get away with lots of cheating are suspiciously stubborn in their determination not to improve it.
We saw a similar thing with regards to standards for IDs in the aftermath of 9/11. State and local governments can decide how vulnerable their ID issuance process is to various kinds of fraud, and many of them knew full well their id systems were jokes and indeed wanted those vulnerabilities to persist for various political reasons because of a large population of holders of improperly-obtained IDs to which the states wanted to turn a blind eye but who would get caught up in a rapid tightening of standards. They told themselves that the national security risk that went along with this toleration of rampant fraud was too small to worry about, until you-know- who did you-know-what in part by them having found it so easy to break the rules to get ids good enough to get on airplanes.
So the 9/11 commission made the crazy suggestion that IDs should not be accepted as good enough to get on airplanes unless they were hard to fake and the minimum standards required to prove one's identity in order to obtain one were raised to a much higher level. With two fronts in the war on terror going, it still took about two years - and nearly four since the attacks - to pass the law requiring states to make better ID systems if they wanted those IDs to be accepted at airports and other federal locations.
After at least half a dozen delays, these mandates may actually go into effect in 2025 - two full decades after the law was passed - and even then, only because that allowed enough time for a kind of genius move in government identity-laundering, suspect identities come out clean. 20 years of steadfast resistance is not something honest and savvy people can excuse and reconcile with innocent explanations.
I would just add this to your analysis:
However reckless Trump might behave in an attempt to 'entrench' himself, it will still prove unequal to the power of the entrenched left, "the college-degreed elites who hold sway in academia, media, and government." to resist him. Or to put it another way - we no longer live (if we ever did) in a Democracy whose reality bears much relation to its rhetoric.
“The college degreed elites”. You mean like Ted Cruz, DeSantis, Tom Cotton, JD Vance, Mike Pompeo, Josh Hawley, etc...?
No, we both know he's talking about the civil service
In the New Hampshire primary earlier this week, exit polls showed that most of the people voting for Nikki Haley were not registered Republicans, and the DNC reportedly raised and spent lots of money to game the system by getting Democrat voters to switch to undeclared so they could vote in the GOP primary. To paraphrase what Scott Adams has said multiple times in recent weeks, it would be possible to design an election system with safeguards against fraud and cheating, and the reason the existing system is designed to make it impossible to audit is that both parties want it that way. That's why, for all his faults, I find Scott Adams refreshing compared to the intellectual fantasy approach. It is not at all clear to me that the peaceful transfer of power is less likely under non-democratic systems. Kling's 'minimalist view' of democracy is equivalent to saying that we don't have a democracy in this country, and that is about the only thing that I agree with him on. We have an elite-based system, the main purpose of elections is to validate that system, and the reason why a peaceful transfer of power is at risk is that the main priorities of the elite (among them, funding an endless string of oversees wars that don't seem to advance our national security, which seems to be the main impetus behind Nikki Haley's candidacy) are increasingly at odds with the interests of a large chunk of the electorate.
Kling's main criticism of Trump is that he didn't accept the legitimacy of the 2020 election.
Kling's main criticism of Democrats is that they play dirty to win in elections and make no attempt to even pretend to care about holding legitimate elections or allowing the public to vote on anyone other than their preferred candidate.
Kling in the past acknowledged that the federal intelligence agencies meddled in the 2020 election and pressured major tech companies and major media companies to restrict circulation of news + discussion unfavorable to the election prospects of the Democratic Party. But Kling basically downplays this and says this doesn't warrant claims of illegitimacy.
McWhorter says, "let the civil war happen." wow... I can't help but lose respect for McWhorter.
"I have faith that many of his supporters will turn against him."
If they did not do it the first time, why would they the second time?
In Trump's entire life, he has never taken an action that harmed me or my family in any way.
I can't say the same for the people he will be running against.
I guess then that you benefitted from his tax cuts to the elite and the deficit he increased.
He probably benefited from the improved economy those tax cuts created.
Preach
Democrats ignore the constitution all the time (especially rulings related to the second amendment), that has never caused masses of people to turn against them.
Yeah, I don't share Arnold's confidence on that point. I think partisanship is strong enough in this day and age that either side is capable of provoking a real crisis.
Of course my even more fundamental disagreement is that I do not consider the "entrenched Leftists" as my enemies, but my deeply, deeply mistaken friends. I can imagine Warren, changing her mind and favoring a revenue-raising, deficit tax on personal incomes or AOC agreeing to send boatload of asylum claims case workers to the border, but not Josh Hawley agreeing to merit based immigration or Marco Rubio agreeing to a tax on net CO2 emissions.
Like many things in life, it is a spectrum. Some of them are reasonable people I just happen to disagree with, some I deem to be miseducated/misguided, others are just cynical apparatchiks who will parrot whatever views seem advantageous, and a few are malignant enough to trigger my inner totalitarian to envision shipping them off to a re-education camp somewhere in the Dakotas.
What first time?
Give us some credit, Bub!
"refusing to abide by court decisions that block part of his agenda"
I don't know about that. There are a lot of things that courts and regulators have done that if the President defied it I would support the president. I very much get a "we are the philosopher kings that can do whatever we want" vibe from many of the things that such officials do. I don't see any constraining limit on their power, they basically regulate themselves.
"I wish that Republican voters would choose someone other than Mr. Trump"
Electing a RINO would be pointless.
DeSantis ran a terrible campaign and made some really dumb decisions (abortion). Quite frankly, its not even clear to me he wanted to be president all that much.
Look, it seems pointless for people not running to complain about the candidates. If Elon Musk wanted to get into politics he could have tried to become the GOP nominee. He didn't, you got to go with who shows up.
I could say the same on the other side. Biden got 65k people to write his name in on the ballot last night. If you don't like Biden, run. Those that have run nobody supports.
Absolutely! "Refusing to abide by court decisions ..." Only somebody in thrall to the judiciary - and to lawyers, remember, the worst people on earth - could say this so peremptorily, as if self-evident.
It depends on whether the court decisions are truly lawful, or whether they are partisan and arbitrary. One can respect the law, and the rule of law, without identifying that with the will of the judiciary, especially if they are violating the spirit of the law by engaging in lawfare and judicial activism.
For people in border states, that point was passed long ago.
I'd assume the same is true for people who must live in cities. That is to say, people old enough to have seen the before and after.
If an election is not free and fair, it is stolen. Censoring the bad truth about one candidate gives that candidate an unfair advantage—if he wins, the loser is right to claim it was unfair, and thus stolen.
Kling, nor McWhorter, accept this principle. They are wrong. 2020 was stolen, 2016 was not.
BUT there was a 2 year Russia Collusion smear campaign against Trump, with a dishonest Mueller investigation because of the principle that misinformation can make an election unfair.
Censoring H Biden’s laptop, and smoking gun evidence of Biden corruption, was illegal election interference to steal the election, enabled by an FBI that knew it was really Biden’s, and knew it had details of illegal corruption.
Trump instigated a Stop The Steal huge, peaceful protest, wanting Pence to select other electors. No insurrection. There was some violence, but the only armed people in the Capitol were cops, and the one shot was shot by a cop. Only the delusional, of which there many, call it an insurrection—none have been indicted for insurrection, much less been convicted. Tho there are still some hundred political prisoners in jail, with no speedy trial.
I believe the FBI had assets in the crowd and incited the crowd’s push into the building, thru a deliberately undermanned crowd control police presence. Kling probably believes no US deep state folk were inciting violence.
In Sept. There was an attempt to kidnap MI Governor Whitmer—enabled and incited by the FBI.
Despite 3 years of investigation, the public still doesn’t know who the J6 FBI assets, maybe agents but maybe not, were. The first 2 years were a shameful kangaroo court of half-truths, with lots of video known but not shown.
A man who loves America, and believes the election was stolen, should continue calling it stolen until proven otherwise. All Americans should be outraged by the failure to have free, fair, voter ID confirmed elections, like most civilized democracies have.
But as mentioned, we don’t become the elected politicians don’t really want them. Florida has them, so it’s clearly possible.
Loury on McWhorter's Trump Derangement Syndrome and being a good smart and reasonable guy except for his obsessive and exaggerated negativity towards one particular individual reminded me of that quote from Andre The Giant, "I don't like to speak badly of people. I have grown up thinking and being told that if you cannot say something nice about someone, you should not say anything at all. But I must break that rule in this case because I hate Hulk Hogan very much. He is a big ugly goon and I want to squash his face."
Sam Harris and John McWhorter are kindred spirits here
There are two versions of TDS: the first in which people froth at the mouth at the mention of his name, and the second in which people buy into his very bad con and believe that he is in it for anything other than himself.
Elite status people with extreme talent to be "Stirrers of Passions" and with dark-triad personality profiles provoke both love (hero champion) and hate (tyrant enemy) but rarely calm and sober indifference. That's from lower people looking up. When it's higher people looking down, it's more like Don Draper, "I don't think about you at all."
As there are no democracies, this is the alleged threat to popularly elected oligarchy and quasi-monarchy. https://jclester.substack.com/p/democracy-a-libertarian-viewpoint
There are two separate questions. First, is the Colorado Supreme Court's decision legally correct? And two, even if it is legally correct, should the Colorado Supreme Court have kept Trump on the ballot anyway because of "democracy?"
Arnold's post addresses the second question but not the first. I don't think you can answer the second question until you have answered the first question.
To show my cards: I don't think you can credibly argue that Trump "engaged" in an "insurrection" so the decision is wrong on the merits. I agree with Arnold's skepticism toward democracy, so if the decision were correct I would be fine with Trump being kept off the ballot. But bceause the decision was wrong, it needs to be reversed.
Trump is tiresome, to be sure. Also tiresome is the atmosphere that springs up around him, maybe more so. I (like many?) hoped the various prosecutions would have fulfilled their intended purpose and he'd be out of the picture. At the very least surely none of us look forward to Groundhog Day for four years of our lives. The idea feels weird; it probably should. Who said the collapse of a country should be orderly and an era of good feelings?
I was basically hoping Desantis would take off. He has a kinda goofy, earnest, preternaturally youthful quality that puts me in mind of Beto O'Rourke but I was hoping the nation wouldn't notice/care. Why should it? The nation too has changed and is goofy/permanently jejune.
But this talk of tyrants feels like a deflection. (My default assumption is that whatever is most talked about, is our least danger.)
Simply, I don't know who's running the country right now. I know it is not Biden. Democrats openly joke about that as well. But strangely, there is no name. There would have been, in the quite recent past. The press would have known, we all probably would have known.
With Trump - well, he can't keep a staff longer than a few months. Strange as it may seem, the Wizard was calling the shots. Or insofar as he could without obstruction from e.g. the military or the judiciary.
So a vote for Biden is a vote for a peaceful continuation of power, sure - who that power is, is a mystery. Is this any problem for the cherished notion of democracy? I suppose not. But we're allowed to think about it.
For me it comes down to this: We are faced with a binary decision. One of two unattractive candidates will win. Which is the lesser of two evils? Put another way: Which of the two will put us the least distance down the road to autocracy during their term? Agony and distress at our situation should not eclipse prudence and common sense in the eternal and often unattractive struggle for preserving and advancing freedom.
Which road do we most want to avoid? I'm not sure how clear the choice is.
Let's take a worst-case assumption: Trump wins, the R's control both houses of Congress (with enough of a margin that they can do without the votes of those Republican legislators who haven't kissed Trump's ring). Trump now knows, as he didn't in 2017, that he needs to vet his appointees more carefully for single-minded loyalty to him (so, for instance, the Federalist Society's imprimatur for judicial appointments is no longer enough).
But Trump doesn't represent a political philosophy or program. All of his efforts will be bent toward broadening the power and glory of one Donald J. Trump. He'll still face resistance: from the Supreme Court, which he won't be able to pack with Trumpistas; from the Fourth Branch, dominated by what Dr. Kling calls the "entrenched left"; and from blue-state governors and legislators. And he'll be 78 years old when he takes the oath of office; the actuaries give him an expected lifespan of about 9 years. Even if he contrives to get around the 22nd Amendment, much of the evil that he did will be interred with his bones.
By contrast, Biden has shown that he's very much about expanding Federal entitlements and regulation. Even without control of both houses of Congress, he's shown himself amply willing to use his phone and pen to accomplish what Congress can't or won't give him. He'll have the enthusiastic support of the Fourth Branch. And the programs he's created or expanded will last long, long after he's laid beneath the sod, since it's impossible to kill an entitlement once established.
Trump may be worse for the cause of freedom during his remaining tenure on this globe of sin. But over the span of decades, a second Biden term, or a Biden-then-Harris term, might be worse for the cause of freedom.
Vote for gridlock: One party in control of the White House, the other in control of Congress.
Then the party in charge of all government departments and bureaucracies, which are busy making up regulations without consulting Congress, and can even enforce those rules using their own armed militias will definitively hold the balance of power. Elected politicians are just the tip of the governmental iceberg.
"President Trump did not like the way that the 2020 election turned out. If he were a decent person and a statesman, he would have put the interests of the country first." This is the crux of the matter. Previous elections were contested but the loser did concede (even the despised Hillary conceded) and this was on the basic premise of peaceful transfer of power and putting country over self, even if reluctantly. Trump is unable to do so. Some of Trump's advisors are already claiming that Democrats are working to "steal" the 2024 election! Yet here we are and the best that either party can put forth is either Biden (yuck) or Trump (barf). Pathetic.
Even the despised Hillary conceded, but then fake opposition research initially funded by her campaign became the basis for the Russia-Gate hoax that was used to stymy and subvert Trump's presidency. And she and her lackey's continued to rile up their gullible voters with ludicrous insinuations that Trump owed his election victory to Putin's intervention in our sacred democracy, rather than her odious personality and terrible campaign. Once that yarn was exhausted, Trump's phone call with the President of Ukraine was used to get him impeached.
Sometimes I get the feeling that the main reason both parties hate Trump so much is that he interrupted their plans to use Ukraine to wage war against Russia. Now they've got their war, and it's a race against time to get the cadaver reelected before the electorate notices that Russia is winning the war.
Believe it or not, the rest of the world exists independently of America's internal politics.
Conceding if you think you were cheated undermines your argument as it implies you didn't actually believe it but simply using it as a political machination. The same reason innocent people found guilty by a jury don't just up and say, to get a reduced sentence or make parole, "ok you got me, you're right, I was lying about my innocence and I'm in fact guilty". I've always applauded Trump for not conceding. I didn't vote for him the first time around but between that and Jan 6th, he has it plus a campaign donation this time.
> I have a very minimalist view of the virtue of democracy. I think that its main benefit is as a mechanism for the peaceful transfer of power.
If that is all you want out of democracy, a monarchy with a clear line of succession would be far more effective.
History has shown that monarchies with any real power rarely pass on that power without challenge and upheaval.
The record for democracies is even worse, especially if one keeps in mind that democracies attempt to pass on power far more often.
It's so bad that defenders of democracy have to resort to making "no true democracy" arguments.