There's a lot you could say about Tablet, and the dismal swamp that is its current homepage. But Armin Rosen is genuinely one of the best writers on American electoral politics out there. His hard look at how elections currently work in this country as distinguished from many others in the world.
The thing is, we were told in 2020 that the election had to be changed to de-emphasize in-person voting because COVID presented an unprecedented risk to health and life. Never mind if that was actually true. The point is that back then nearly everyone with a profile said it was, and most people seemed to believe them. In 2024 COVID is a hobby for terminal worrywarts. Almost nobody anywhere on the political spectrum is treating it as a lifechanging crisis. So why do we need to keep what we were told were emergency measures in place when the emergency has passed?
That question can be answered with another: Cui bono? For the Biden Administration, currently trying to launch itself into the Harris Administration, the election of 2020 went exactly how they wanted it to. Naturally, it's being treated as a model.
The problem is that if one side openly optimizes election laws for their own sole benefit, it makes it hard to trust the system for those outside the party. That should concern you regardless of who you intend to vote for, if anyone.
2 comments:
That very astute essay by Armin Rosen detailed
much that is wrong with electoral practices in the US,
in particular where the media has been guilty of
manipulating public perceptions has turned the
process into a circus. The red state blue state thing
has been going on for a number of election cycles
with nothing ever being resolved about particular
issues other than platitudes. Looking at the platforms
for the current cycle it's hard to see much difference
with the proviso that Kamala is now promising to do
everything Trump has promised but better and faster..
The voter registration anomalies are absurd and the
fact there is no longer a recognized system for r
egistering a vote is bizarre.
Most recently:
Covid and the resulting panic became an opportunity
for partisan activists and lawyers to rapidly accelerate
changes to American voting practices that were already
high up on their agendas.
As Rahm Emanuel quipped:
You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what
I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think
you could not do before.
It appears the Democrats have reached panic level at
this point. Could they simply be afraid of losing their jobs
or might they be paranoid about having Lawfare turned
on them? Probably both.
It was fascinating to read about how elections are held
in Somalia and other countries. Around here there'll be
a provincial election (using paper ballots) next month.
Political campaigns here are of much shorter duration.
In America it seems the competition is neverending
Is the media no longer interested in informing its ostensible customers or is it now incapable of doing so. It's something of a vicious cycle. Meanwhile the electoral system is in bad repair. Contrary to what we're led to believe the biggest threat to democracy isn't that a despotic or anti-democratic candidate will win. It's that everyone (or at least everyone with power) will decide that having the forms of a democratic republican government is no longer worth the effort.
Emanuel's comment makes you wonder, doesn't it? If a serious crisis is an opportunity to do more of what they wanted and were never able to do before, why wait for serious crises to arise on their own?
One reason why you should avoid lawfare is the very fact that it does open the door to the same being used on you. And you lose whatever moral high ground you might have had. It's like that Man for All Seasons quote you used before. "And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?"
Electoral competition has become more time consuming with every cycle, until it seems to be perpetual. But at the same time, the level of serious competition within the parties has collapsed. That leaves most of the politicking that's always being done as a strictly partisan thing.
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