From the Lincoln Project of course.
This is actually very painful to watch. Will it swing any votes? I’m dubious.
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by Michael Froomkin
Laurie Silvers & Mitchell Rubenstein Distinguished Professor of Law
University of Miami School of Law
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Unfortunately, I think a lot of Trump supporters cast an anti-Hillary vote last time around because Hillary represented an anti-establishment vote. Bernie would have done just as well for many of these voters.
Unfortunately, they’ve been placed into an adversarial relationship with all Democrats — whether former Hillary supporters or not — as they’ve defended their choice for the past 3 years. Now they’re entrenched.
The Democratic Party screwed up. Nobody wanted Hillary. They haven’t had a strategy in decades.
The Republicans have had a long-term strategy since Geroge W. Ball laid out a plan in 1968 to design the successor to the nation-state in order to “emancipate” the modern, global “world company.” In 1971 Louis Powell laid out a practical social program to help ensure domestic support for Ball’s proposal, to defend against the “attack” on corporate America. Roger Ailes’ 1968 plan to “put the GOP on the news” has been put into practice by Rupert Murdoch. It’s a well-designed strategy: take advantage of civil society to dismantle it.
Sun Tzu said the purpose of strategy is to control one’s adversary. If the Democrats do not have a strategy that makes them an effective opposition party, but rather, are a reactionary party of the status-quo, then they are aiding the Republican Party by reacting predictably to the Republican strategy. They are controlled.
Boycott the two-party system. Cast a no-confidence vote in the electoral college. Vote for yourself as a write-in. Don’t worry you might be throwing your vote away: there is more than one way in which your vote may not matter in November anyway.
This is truly awful, evil, advice: if ever there was a time to vote to keep out the greater evil, this is it. It would be a terrible time to vote for a candidate with no hope of election. And it certainly will not in any way induce the Democratic Party to have a long term plan, something it’s probably not capable of doing anyway being constructed as a coalition of so many different groups.
It’s realpolitik. It’s not “don’t vote for a lesser evil” but “let’s use the electoral system to figure out how many of us are out there who are willing to change our ineffective approach to politics and simultaneously create a statistical void in the election results that nobody can spin.”
Trump is a social problem, not an electoral problem.
Even if he does NOT opt to take the 1824 route and force a “contingent election” in the House to bypass the Electoral College, we won’t be rid of him.
Machiavelli wrote in his Discourses:
… as long as such men see that your reputation is greater than theirs, they will never remain quiet and bear it with patience. Moreover, should such men have been used to living in a corrupt city in which education has not done them any good, it is impossible for any misfortune to convert them to a better state of mind. Rather would they see their country ruined than fail to obtain their ends and satisfy their perverse mentality. To overcome envy of this kind the only remedy lies in the death of those who are imbued with it.
We’re on stage five of Robert Paxton’s Five Stages of Fascism. Fasicism is a process, not a conventional -ism.
Election or not, Trump isn’t going away.