some scattered thoughts on the coming election

or, a marionette pantomimes

This won’t be an essay but rather a bit of a scattershot approach to the politics of the moment.

Try as I might, I keep finding myself giving opinions about politics. Here are the other things I’ve written this year about this impending election:

• the end of democracy

• Let Fandom Swallow You Whole

• Let’s Go Walzing - someone unsubcribed after I published that and emailed to tell me that I had gone woke. I found this interesting enough to admit to all of you now, nearly three months later.

Let’s cut to it: who’s going to win.

The long and short of my prediction is that I think Trump will win.

I’ve thought this essentially since 2021 and while the Harris bump this summer made me wonder if she might pull it off, the more recent Harris slump is making me doubt her almost entirely.

This is embarrassing.

It’s embarrassing for the Democrats that they are going to lose an election to a historically unpopular politicians who had a pretty unsuccessful first term. It’s also embarrassing for Trump that the race is this close with someone as unliked as Harris. I think a big part of why it’s close is JD Vance and the simple fact that Trump doesn’t have the economic appeal without Steve Bannon feeding him populism. Right now, the case for Trump largely depends on how much you like Trump and how much you hate Democrats.

Of course, this Madison Square Garden event may throw a final wrench in the election, but I imagine the people who write about politics care about this a lot more than the average voter.

But I would say that the GOP has already won this election.

Well, no they haven’t. Most people haven’t even voted yet.

Yes, sure, but what we’re seeing in Harris is a turn away from progressive politics. She abandoned universal healthcare, she’s on the campaign trail with billionaire Mark Cuban and Barack Obama. She’s courting conservative voters by buddying up with Liz Cheney and even war criminal Dick Cheney.

If the Democrats are meant to be the progressive party, why are they currently leaning into far-right figures like the Cheneys?

More than that, the flyers and pamphlets I see here in Minnesota from Democrats has them pushing their credentials as tough on crime and tough on the border—one might wonder why a Minnesota election would have much to say about the Mexican border—which is such a drastic shift away from where the party was in 2016 and 2020. And the party was already conservative in those races!

So what we’re seeing in this election is the Democrats adopting the positions of their Republican counterparts.

One might wonder why we only have two parties and why they are both conservative, but this is America, baby.

That sounds a bit bleak.

I suppose I just find this exercise a bit pointless. Especially this year.

Anyway.

I’m predicting a low voter turnout, which advantages Republicans because of the nature of the Electoral College.

We really should abolish the Electoral College.

I think a popular vote is the correct way to go about an election in the vast majority of countries, but not one as geographically diverse and scattered as the US. You may be taking in a breath to yell at me right now, but I’m actually in favor of the Electoral College with some key reforms.

I think because of the way populations have consolidated in the US, we do risk essentially wiping out the vote for millions of people. Now, granted, that’s currently the state of things with the Electoral College as it is.

In fact, it’s worse: a voting population of about 150mil people is reduced to the whims of about 100,000 people scattered across a few states.

Which is far, far worse.

The election of a country of this size and power should not be determined by specific counties in Michigan and Ohio.

But a pure popular vote would also mean that those same people essentially have no say in the election.

Both are bad, I think. One is much worse and it’s what we have now.

I think a simple reform is to stop making each state winner takes all. What that could look like:

Trump gets 40% of the vote in CA and Harris picks up the majority with 60% (I actually imagine this will be closer than that). If we do proportional votes, this would give Trump ~21 Electoral Votes and Harris the remaining 34, rather than giving Harris all 54.

This simple adjustment puts every state back into the election. It gives candidates a reason to campaign in Kentucky and the Carolinas. The GOP will spend time trying to get votes in WA and NY and Democrats will remember the other 45 states exist. Because if Democrats can pick up 2 or 3 votes in Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, Montana, and so on, those start to add up.

Same thing for the GOP. If you can count on 14-25 votes from CA, that’s definitely worth competing for. Same with Texas. If Texas splits their 40 votes between the parties, we see a more dynamic election where all people feel as if their vote matters. Because, in a way, it does matter more.

Seems like a popular vote with more steps.

And perhaps it is, but I do believe the perception of equality and representation is as important as its reality, at least with elections.

In what way?

At a pure popular vote, it does mean that urban people essentially decide the course of the country. Rightly or wrongly, entire states of people will feel as if their vote doesn’t matter.

Which is how everyone feels now.

And that sucks, yes?

And maybe it’s a dumb idea, but I know the current state of things is one of the absolute worst ways to run an election.

My other main reform is to expand the House. There’s no reason we’ve capped the House at 538 members.

More representation means more democracy, I think. And so rather than taking Electoral Votes from small states to give to big states, you just expand the House with the population, which was how we did things not so long ago.

What if the House runs out of physical space?

Well, that might be a good reason to cap it, I guess.

What about social issues this election? The GOP is coming for trans people, and they’ve already mostly outlawed abortion.

And what have the Democrats done about that?

I’m one of those annoying leftists who thinks that material politics is far more important than social politics.

But the legislative branch of the government simply needs to do it’s job. Congress can override the Supreme Court.

It chooses not to with regard to abortion.

Further, I think most social questions are solved through dealing with the material conditions of citizens. Trans people, for example: if everyone has access to free healthcare, these people no longer have to shop doctors to find someone to help them.

Come on. The debate about trans people is a bit broader than healthcare.

I find it incredibly strange that we have decided to hinge modern politics on an incredibly small portion of the population.

I’m sorry if that seems flippant, but I do think there are more important questions in politics than this. To put it simply: I think trans people should have the same protections that all citizens have, which includes freedom from discrimination. I think they deserve healthcare.

Until everyone has healthcare, though, I don’t think any amount of ungendering language on public forms or in social settings is going to make their lives better. I don’t think seeing more trans people in Marvel movies is going to improve the material conditions of these people’s lives.

Unless, you know, they’re the actors depicting those trans characters.

But you also can’t legislate away hatred. Which is why they should be protected, just like every other minority group. That doesn’t stop targeted violence against minorities, though, because it can’t.

Well then, between Harris and Trump, who do you like economically?

To be honest: neither.

In my view, antitrust is the most important political question of our time. Monopolies have run unregulated and unrestrained for nearly fifty years and it has decimated America. The middle class is gone. Just completely gone. And though people may not want to admit it, they were built by the New Deal and the imposition of antitrust laws on massive corporations.

Lina Khan, the Biden appointed head of the FTC, is the most consequential person in government and the first person in government in my lifetime that honestly seems interested in governance. She’s leading the antitrust cases against facebook, google, amazon, and apple. She’s blocking market consolidation, or at least trying to.

And for all my conservative friends and readers: what you hate about Hollywood and videogames and books really comes down to a problem of market consolidation. The entire culture war that everyone obsesses over is a byproduct of market consolidation.

Wokeness and identity politics, despite their academic and cultural roots, have largely become marketing campaigns and ways to individualize systemic abuses and failures.

Do you really think Jeff Bezos cares about the Black Lives Matter movement? Or was #BLM on the amazon homepage a cynical marketing decision to get liberals who made their profile picture into a black square feel good about themselves for dumping money into a company that they self report as a blight?

But everything you hate in America right now is largely the story of market consolidation and monopolization. It’s why Texas went without power during a bad ice storm. It’s the true source of inflation during the last four years. It’s why the covid pandemic caused the global supply chain to buckle and break, leaving you without toilet paper and milk. It’s why movies are terrible and your favorite TV shows keep getting canceled. It’s why Star Wars is lame and Star Trek is dumb.

It’s why if you go to the hospital right now for surgery, you may be facing a shortage of IV fluid due to the recent hurricanes, for another more life threatening example.

I bring all this up to say that neither Harris nor Trump will likely keep her on.

Wall St is salivating at her dismissal.

And both Harris and Trump are cozying up to big tech and to Wall St. They both promise a return to the status quo, which is to further consolidation, to a constricted market.

So now you’re a free market capitalist?

Well, no, not ever. But if you believe in a free market, if you want to see a free market, you need to break up monopolies.

You need to get money out of politics or the country will continue to be run by the lobbyists with the most cash.

Harris has set fundraising records.

She’s wandering the country surrounded by billionaires. Trump is wandering the country with the richest man on the planet dumping obscene amounts of money into his campaign and will likely receive the largest personalized tax break in US history for the effort. If this sounds incredibly corrupt, don’t worry, the GOP is also blocking the appointment of what amounts to the corruption checker until Trump is in office, assuming he wins.

My hope is that the brazenness of Musk in this election will lead to some reform, though as my brother asked, Who would vote for that and what courts would ensure that it happen?

Bleak.

And while every election of my lifetime has been one where unelected oligarchs determine the course of US politics, it feels extravagantly blatant here, from both sides.

You have war criminal social media influencing billionaire and former president Barack Obama castigating various minority groups for not voting the way he wants.

Not exactly the right messenger for telling Muslims how to vote.

To say the least. He might be more credible had he not spent 8 years killing them (including at least one US citizen) through an unregulated and illegal drone war and illegally spying on them across the globe. But he also oversaw the decimation of the black middle class which were sacrificed on the alter of big banks. At the time of his presidency, he had deported more illegal immigrants from south of the border than any president in history.

Why these various groups would vote for Trump is a bit more flummoxing, but only if you consider these specific axes.

Muslims and the Democrats have been in an uneasy alliance since Bush’s War on Terror. Socially, Muslims and black and Hispanic people have more in common with the average GOP voter, excepting a few cases.

However, if war in the Middle East is the deciding factor here for Muslims, it’s even more absurd to allow Trump to stand as the peace candidate.

He’s not for peace! He joined the ranks of war criminals almost as soon as he got in office! To be sure, it’s a longstanding American tradition to have our presidents oversee and set in motion war crimes, but few have done it with such gusto and speed as Trump.

And he promises to exterminate Palestine, which apparently has American Palestinian activists wondering if he’s a better choice than Harris who is already part of the administration funding the decimation of Palestine.

Now we’re veering towards foreign policy. With that in mind—

Before we get there, I’d just like to say a few more things.

The Democrats have been a party in freefall since 2008 when Barack Obama won the election. Most state governments are controlled by the GOP. The Supreme Court and the vast majority of federal courts throughout the country are filled with GOP appointees. Congress has become a hall of farce since Newt Gingrich decided the best governance was gridlock in the mid-90s.

The Democrats right now are running on the GOP platform of 2008, with the exception of a few social causes.

At the same time, they’re telling you that Trump is a threat to democracy and the 21st century’s Hitler.

This wasn’t effective in 2016 or 2020 and it won’t be effective this time. It’s lost all purchase with independents for the simple fact that the Democrats didn’t act on this.

Trump’s presidency was largely one of failure where the only political victory he had was a Chinese tariff (which Biden has kept) and an enormous tax break for the wealthy and a tax increase for everyone else.

One thing we didn’t see happen was the end of democracy or a new Third Reich forming.

But! If you, as a Democrat politician or operative, believe that that’s true, how do you let him run for president again? How do you not try him for treason, for war crimes, for any possible thing you can try him for?

You literally called him a spy for Russia! In your own words, he committed treason while sitting as president!

And yet.

Instead of coming after him for being Hitler, they came after him for having sex with a pornstar, which amounted to 34 felony charges.

Stellar stuff, guys. That’ll keep New Hitler from creating concentration camps.

But do you see how absurd this is?

If Trump is a literal threat to democracy, why have the Democrats done nothing?

I imagine the fundraising is quite good when you have a pitch like that.

And all American politics swirls around a bottomless pit of greed and wealth.

We live in a country where all media is owned by billionaires and all of it has been consolidated under a few umbrellas. And—

Did you read Bezos’ Washington Post Op-Ed about why the paper isn’t endorsing a candidate?

This is all so unserious it makes me wish I was blind.

He essentially lays out his various conflicts of interest and then expects us to say, That does seem hard and kind of unfair when you put it like that.

The man bought the paper to influence politics. If you don’t understand that then I don’t know what to tell you.

He’s right, though, about newspaper endorsements.

Well, I’ll give him that. All 200,000 people who unsubscribed because the Washington Post didn’t endorse Harris are very silly people. I assume very few of those people also unsubscribed from Amazon Prime or will stop using Amazon. Which is where you would really hit his bottom line.

He runs the Washington Post at a loss and he does it for various reasons. But one of them is that the importance of the Post outweighs the economic loss of running it.

If you need your newspapers to reflect your personal beliefs, you are a child. I don’t know how to say it nicer than that. That’s simply not the purpose of newspapers or news organizations.

But hopefully this will encourage people to consider, again, how important antitrust is. How important it is to keep the entire economy and media from consolidating under fewer and fewer people.

Because if Bezos killed this at the final moment, you can assume he’s killed many other stories. And even if he hasn’t, the hiring process involves vetting journalists and part of that vetting process is ensuring that these journalists have the correct politics or interests.

The employee is already, through various forms of social and economic pressure, disinclined from speaking out against the boss. But this is even more pronounced when the boss simply chooses people who are unlikely to speak out.

Like many things, Chomsky said it 30 years ago.

The last few seconds of that clip are key to understanding this topic.

Marr: How can you know that I’m self-censoring? How can you know that journalists are self-censoring?

Chomsky: I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.

So onto foreign policy.

Look, I think it’s quite simple for someone like me.

Yeah?

Yes. I’m a pacifist.

We no longer have any party that even has an antiwar wing. We don’t even have antiwar politicians anymore.

So what should happen in Ukraine or Palestine, for example? Well, I think both wars will continue in much the same way as they have regardless of who becomes president. Yes, even if Trump becomes president, we will likely see Ukraine continue much as it has.

He promised to end the war in Afghanistan yet we remained for his whole presidency, though it is true that peace talks began with his administration. Of course, this is also after he increased aggression in Afghanistan.

The bigger part of all this for me is that there is no candidate for peace anywhere on any ballot in this country from either major party.

What about third party?

You will find them there, yes.

Should people vote third party?

Every four years, we pantomime democracy by going to the polls and filling in some dots. If you want to vote third party, go for it. If, like many Americans, you choose not to vote, that’s fine.

Of course, we don’t call voting third party or not voting as a protest vote, but I think it is often the correct way to view these behaviors.

It’s a vote that says Neither Republican Nor Democrat.

Though journalists and talking heads will apoplectically shriek about all those who dare choose Neither when offered Coke or Pepsi.

The important elections are the local ones. Your city government. Your county government. Even your state government. These are the people most beholden to you and the ones most invested—self-interestedly—in serving your needs.

These are the elections that matter.

I can tell you that the Democrats more align with my beliefs, but they’re also so far from what I’d like that they may as well be political enemies of mine. I mean, in reality, they are my political enemies. And every four years we playact as if they can be bullied or shamed into becoming more of what I’d like them to be.

They attempt to shame me and people like me into voting for them on the promise that they’ll do something about children in cages or oppressive economic conditions.

But what do they do once in office?

Mostly they tell me how difficult it is to do anything.

The Republicans are at least more honest about being my opposition. They don’t plead to me to care about anything. And at this point, they’re essentially a political organization without a platform, without policies, so I don’t entirely know what to make of them. Their primary function seems to be to trigger the libs and get tax breaks for rich people and to further consolidate the economy.

And restrict personal freedoms, but both parties generally lean that way.

But a vote for Donald Trump seems to continually stand as the middle finger vote. It’s taken the place of the third party protest vote, I think.

Which is fair, honestly, because it is a very loud Fuck You.

I don’t like that he will most likely become president again, but I understand why the Fuck You vote has so much appeal to people, especially right now, in 2024, when everything seems worse than it’s ever been, when housing and food prices are through the roof.

It has always had this appeal.

I could sit here and tell you a thousand things in a thousand different ways, but the simple truth is that I find this election depressing and embarrassing.

What about president?

What about them?

Your vote matters most in your city, county, and state.

Sure, but should people vote for Harris or Trump?

I don’t give a shit.