The Sacking
It is not too early to contemplate Trump in the White House in January 2025.
2020 Election Deniers will be in charge of administering the 2024 election results process in 17 states; 8 are left to tip any outcome towards Trump. Perhaps more. (1)
Contemplate this: that’s the Electoral College.
Consider that after four years of election denial being wired into the collective consciousness of a major political party in basically a two party political infrastructure, the certifying body, the Electoral College is about to be sacked.
The Republican Party will ‘own’ the Electoral College. And America has been here before: January 6, 2021. That event was “showing up.” This event will be “showing force.”
Consider that the failure of the U.S. Congress to impeach former President Trump on charges of election tampering and probable insurrection emboldened a minority party to seize the levers of election administration.
The 2024 Presidential “Election” will not be determined by a tumble in the sack and subsequent cover-up, nor an “October surprise,” nor a debate stage gaffe, nor a senior “moment,” nor even an unfavorable court case outcome. None of these possibilities, which all presume an institutional insulation from political takeover, prevailing rational thinking and reckoning, even “bottom up” advocacy for democracy, can protect its citizens.
Rather, the outcome of the 2024 Election will be determined by the Electoral College. And the EC is controlled by the outcomes of the states’ Presidential votes. An assembly of states’ representatives, “assigned electors,” make up the EC. Some assignees are proportional to the popular vote outcome; some simply to whomever wins the national popular vote. Most states assign electors based on the states’ county and state voting district outcomes. And in most states, notably the ones that have or are recently swinging “blue,” the districts are gerrymandered, disproportionately assigning mandate to “minority” party elected officials, who then control the districting, ad nauseum.
And in polarized America, whose voting population has inched to the left, the minority party is the Republican Party whose members swear to subvert the entire system in order to hold onto power.
The legal solution — remove Trump’s name from the ballot — is remote and does not account for Trump’s name being written in. More legal liability. More Court cases, delays, dismissals, ad nauseum.
How about dismissal and or a pardon if Trump is elected?
Only a state case outcome can survive an executive pardon and beyond New York and Florida cases — yet to arrive at jury selection stage — that’s Georgia’s RICO bucket, which won’t see the public eye anytime soon, certainly not before the 2024 election.
Which brings us back to the States, the State electors and the Electoral College.
The Electoral College is one of several anti-democratic strictures written into the Constitution. Of the founding fathers, Adams might have voted for Trump. Paine and Franklin, non-slaveholders, certainly not.
So to preserve white dominance over the voting process, the founding fathers assured their colleagues, all planters, their role in governing the fledgling democracy in name only.
We know the rest. The ‘rest of the rest,’ not so much: so many books to ban, so many libraries to close, so many ‘corrupt’ commies to defame, so many lib miscreants to cancel. So many death by cuts to the 14th amendment, the sole bulwark for democracy post slavery.
Which brings us back to the voters. More is at stake than casting a vote:
Its worth thinking about what the right has been doing for the past thirty-five years as a counter-revolution that has been waged against our victories. The New Deal is usually told as a history of F.D.R, but we don’t talk enough about the pressure from below. Neighborhoods organized, and when their evicted neighbors’ furniture was put out on the street they moved it back into their homes. It was that kind of direct action that won victories like rent control, public housing, and the creation of Fannie Mae. The other thing that’s important is that the organizers were a threat — of socialist revolution — and it was that which allowed F.D.R. to say to Wall Street, ‘We have to compromise, or else we’ve got a revolution on our hands.’ (2)
-Naomi Klein (2008)
Consider that America’s reliance on poll numbers to protect democracy is not fairing well: nothing like prognostication to overwhelm organization. Unfavorable polling numbers and folks throw up their hands and stay home.
Consider that voting is uncomfortable. Inconvenient. No wonder your right to obtain and consume bottled water on a line waiting to cast a vote is transactional.
Consider that voting is not really a substitute for accountability. Even 2 years — the minimum office term — can’t protect its electorate from corruption and abuse of power. Ad nauseum.
Consider where your vote ends up.
Consider the myriad mini aggressions we suffer daily. Now translate that into the multiple raids on our institutions, protecting America from a violent takeover. The violence may be obscured by sound bites and cropped images, or even polite chastising/shaming, but America will suffer none the same.
Consider the business of authoritarianism is precisely to put a spin on violence towards friend, family, and institution. Recall Eichmann’s passionate defense that it wasn’t his ‘position’ to watch ‘Jews refuse to defend themselves.’
Trump and party know this: intimidation is far more effective.
September 23
Notes
1- Ari Berman, “New Report: One-Third of States Have an Election Denier Overseeing Elections,” Mother Jones, September 17, 2023
2- Larissa MacFarquhar, “Outside Agitator, Naomi Klein and the New New Left,” The New Yorker, November 30, 2008
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