Still on About the Electoral College

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/electors-intelligence-briefing-trump-russia-232498

I will preface this by saying that I think we should keep objecting to the developing Trump administration, agenda, and  the President-elect himself on every front available. Nor do I think trying to find a way to prevent his inauguration on 1/20, within the bounds of the Constitution is out of line.

But I’m just not optimistic. Let’s say these electors get what they want. all 538 electors are granted security clearances, and are given a briefing by the CIA and other relevant agencies regarding Russian involvement in the election and the Trump campaign. Let’s even say the information is sufficiently alarming that it actually convinces more than 38 electors to withhold their votes for Trump, and he loses enough as a result to fail to secure actual victory. I think it is INCREDIBLY unlikely that enough of them would actually choose to vote instead for Clinton to give her the win. Which means, therefore, that the election gets decided by the House of Representatives. Which will almost certainly still vote Trump into office. Many of them will tell themselves they are doing so to avoid massive civil unrest (which is probably an at least somewhat valid concern – if Trump is denied a victory by both “faithless electors” and the House, there are certain to be millions of people sufficiently outraged to start riots, no matter how justified), but a lot of them are sufficiently partisan that they genuinely won’t care – Trump is the mascot for their team, and it doesn’t matter how he got there. They want to win, and the costs aren’t important.

At this point, I think our best hope is that there’s enough damning evidence that someone in a position to know it will leak enough of it to the public to compel an impeachment vote. It’s quite clear that McConnell doesn’t care on his own, and far too few of his colleagues do, either. But if the public pressure is hard enough, he’ll do it to save his own neck, which evidence already demonstrates he stuck in the lion’s mouth to get his team the win. But that’s not a terribly strong hope right now, either. I think we’re going to have to run damage control for the next 4 years, and just work really, really hard to ensure there still are elections in 2020 – and that they’re cleaner than this one.

There’s a lot of ways this could still go, depending on exactly how much of a Russian puppet Trump actually is, and precisely how myopic the Republicans in Congress are willing to be to satisfy their personal ambitions. Everyone likes to think we have a very robust system of government, because it’s survived for 2 and a half centuries, but when a representative system is subsumed by autocracy, it can happen extremely fast, and the age of its institutions doesn’t necessarily matter much. In 4 years’ time, there’s a fair chance we’ll be looking at the 1950s as a distant goal to work back towards, compared to where we are.

On the other hand, there are a lot of forces arrayed against the incoming administration, and most of them are very much awake to the dangers it represents. Well-organized opposition could do a lot to frustrate attempts to dismantle the American system as we know it.

The problem is that virtually none of them have direct political power. The complete failure of the Democratic Party to respond effectively to Republican efforts to undermine fair representation at every level of government have left it in an historically weak position across the country, save for a relative handful of bastions in the Northeast and West Coast. Without strong leadership and a clear mission to restore basic equality to the voting process, that problem is going to get worse, not better. The various interest groups that traditionally back Democrats are collectively powerful, but with so little direct representation in government, it will be harder to focus their efforts effectively. There will be a tendency to disperse their power in too many different directions, weakening them all overall.  There’s a lot of work ahead.

Belief vs. Reason

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/12/07/why-conservatives-might-be-more-likely-to-fall-for-fake-news

The average modern American conservative’s worldview is built on belief and conviction, rather than logic and reason. They’ve already decided what the fundamental truths of the world are, and any reality that contradicts that worldview must be ignored. When that’s one’s starting position, it becomes much, much easier for confirmation bias to rule one’s perspective on everything that comes along.

Which is why not all liberals are immune to “fake news” – not everyone on the political left builds their worldview around the principles of reason, either. And why at least some conservatives are still resistant to it, too – not all of them fit the above description.

How It All Went Wrong

https://thefreecities.com/liberal-orthodoxy-is-driving-off-a-cliff-a3d007a58303

It’s a more aggressively-worded piece, but not fundamentally different in its analysis from the one I commented on a couple weeks ago. It’s sloppy thinking to presume that there’s one answer to why this election turned out the way it did – there were approximately 175 million eligible voters, about 50 million of them stayed home, and about 60 million voted one way, another 60 million the other, and a few million more voted neither. It’s silly to presume that every single member of those 4 groups of people had the same reasons for the choice they made.

I think the vast majority of Trump’s supporters made a huge mistake. A mistake they’re going to regret. I think the fact that they were willing to, at best, overlook the many, many ways in which Trump is manifestly unfit not only for public office but existing in modern society is deeply troubling. But as Mr. Baugh says, we cannot afford to write them off, and it is unworthy of us to think of them as merely a resource to exploit, either – that is exactly what most elected Republicans do (and it’s definitely what Trump does), and the whole point of liberal ideals is to be better than that.

That said, I think the real core of the Clinton campaign’s strategic mistake was 2-fold, and neither part was really about the Rust Belt, per se, white or not. First, it was putting far, far too much emphasis on how terrible Trump is, and second, not spending anywhere near enough time counteracting the prevailing narrative about Clinton that the right has pushed on her for decades. By focusing on Trump, he gets to run the table, and by trying to just brush off all the lies and distortions running around about her, it creates the false narrative that it’s a “lesser of two evils” decision.

But this isn’t all the Democrats’ fault, either. The media failed to report on Trump correctly until far too late, and unevenly even then. Nowhere near enough people took him seriously for far too long. And I think it’s undeniable that interference from Russia (at minimum feeding the hacked emails to WikiLeaks, probably also actively advising and assisting the Trump campaign directly, and maybe possibly even attempting to interfere with the vote itself, though the evidence isn’t there for that last if it occurred), and the FBI played a role as well.

Freedom of the Press

Unfortunately one of several troubling policies the Obama administration continued or expanded from the Bush administration that will now be coming back to haunt us in spades, I expect.

This is why abuses of power, even for the right reasons, are so problematic: it establishes precedents and frameworks for those who follow, regardless of their intentions or character.

As the Obama administration draws to a close a lot of people are getting extremely nostalgic.  I think he did a good job about 80% of the time, especially considering how extreme his opposition was throughout. The 20% includes some big things, though – and nearly all of them are things that are likely to get a LOT worse with a successor as irresponsible as Trump.

And to put it in perspective, W. Bush did a good job maybe 15% of the time, and Clinton, particularly with some distance, only managed about 70%. Nobody’s going to be great all the time, and a lot of Presidents have been downright awful.

House Minority Leader

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/nancy-pelosi-house-democratic-leader_us_583ed770e4b0ae0e7cdae8f5

Insofar as it matters who Minority Leader in the House is at all (very little – the Speaker of the House has FAR more control than Majority Leader in the Senate does, and the Minority Leader in the Senate has concomitantly much more power than his counterpart in the House), Pelosi remains a pretty capable choice.

That being said, basically everybody of power and influence in the Democratic Party is old. Even everybody’s liberal darling, Elizabeth Warren is in her 60s. There’s a serious, structural problem with the party that the presidency of Barack Obama did not do nearly enough to address, despite the broad support of young voters for his personal candidacy. And the age of their stable of well-known figures is going to be a problem when the time comes to try to unseat Trump and Pence in 2020.

On Repealing “Obamacare”

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/11/30/503760677/millions-of-people-are-having-an-easier-time-paying-medical-bills

We’ve probably got until sometime in July at least. More likely January of 2018, and possibly even further down the pike. Despite all the tough talk, it’ll take them a while to hash out a bill that has a hope of actually passing – it was easy to keep voting on a consequence-free bit of stagecraft when they knew the Senate couldn’t ever pass anything and the President wouldn’t sign it, but now they’ve got to find a way to dismantle a huge government program involving millions of people across the entire country. And they’ve got to do it in such a way that it doesn’t induce all of those people to rise up in fury and vote them out of office in 2018.

Railing against “Obamacare” is easy. Taking away the health insurance of millions of people, and shoving thousands more into the unemployment lines by eliminating their jobs providing and facilitating that insurance is not. And if they actually did what they say they want to do – keep just the “good parts” of the ACA (keeping kids on parent insurance, forbidding denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions) and get rid of the “bad parts” (the individual mandate, fair rate regulation, Medicaid expansion, real subsidies), they’d quickly discover why the ACA was written the way it was, except the hard way – by seeing how fantastically broken they’d just made the entire American health care industry, and probably crashing the entire economy in the process.

All things being equal, the Republicans have so thoroughly gerrymandered districts across the country that they are likely to retain their majority in the House in 2 years. The Senate is less clear, but still more likely to stay theirs than they were to win it this year. But do something on the scale of “break the country” – no matter how much they’ve been promising to repeal the ACA since it passed – and all bets are off. Republicans got what they wanted – they won the election thoroughly. Now they get to govern – and the results are all on them. That means they’d better either not mess things up too badly, or have a really good story for why it isn’t their fault from here on out. They’ve been good at spinning lies as long as all they really had was talk, but I think it’s going to be a bit of a different story when they’re inarguably in the driver’s seat.