Every Election is Stolen Forever
So, why bother?
Here we are. Midterm elections are tomorrow, and you know what that means, chaos will befall our once-great nation as we scramble to determine who the rightfully or wrongfully elected candidates will be. Republicans are forecasted to take control of the House and possibly the Senate, and great efforts will be made to convince the nation this was a referendum that should suffice to permanently rebuke the progressive left. The Democrats on the other hand will sweat to shift blame somewhere else, certainly not the party that was in control of Congress and the Executive office for the last two years. Both have made this out to be the most important election of our lifetime when the informed citizen knows it’s the next one that will hang our mortal existence in the balance. So, go vote tomorrow because it’s your civic duty, and if you don’t exercise your right to choose the governance you live under you may lose it someday. Or don’t - because democracy is an oppressive institution that requires half the population to live under the thumb of their opponent. It might not matter anyways - just don’t wear the sticker.
Cheers,
FA
Democrats and Republicans alike have made out these midterms to be the most critical election in our nation’s history, but the rhetoric surrounding them is the same as what seems to be all elections of national import this side of the millennium. They claim the veracity of all future democratic processes hangs in the balance this November as if they won’t be revealed to be increasingly parodical of the elections of the last decade. The noticeable difference between each election cycle is that each year both parties appear to be using an upgraded, higher concentrated version of cynicism than the previous iteration.
Campaigning for the 2024 presidential election hasn’t begun in earnest yet the results are in. It was stolen. Stolen like Trump’s victory in 2016, and Biden’s in 2020. Stolen like Georgia Governor Brian Kemp’s win over self-proclaimed governor Democrat Stacey Abrams. Stolen like every election that will come afterward. Welcome to a late-stage republic where election results are denied no matter the outcome, and no party may rightfully attain power.
This could be seen in the build-up to the 2020 election. Both camps were making the claim before polls had opened that the results of the election, if they weren’t favorable to their own candidate, would be dubious. Senator Biden had the easier route to constructing a narrative that seemed plausible to the electorate as the legacy media pushed the Russia-gate conspiracy on the American people for the better part of four years. President Trump, however, had to rely on his 2016 tactics, declaring that the process had been rigged and that he wouldn’t accept the results if he lost. This time it was seemingly obscure voting laws that may or not have been legal and the first presidential election where mail-in voting was to feature prominently that laid the foundations of his concerns.
Democrats and Republicans were bent on laying out the scaffolding on which they would scale accusations of the grandest of larceny. In doing so, they would not only call into question the results of the election but deride their opponents as enemies of democracy. If you convince your constituents that their political opponents - of a two-party system no less - of that then any strategy you conceive of to thwart their pursuits becomes permissible. Twitter and Facebook have walked back their previous prohibition of the Hunter Biden laptop story now that Joe Biden is safely seated in the Oval Office with no consequence. Public intellectual Sam Harris has suggested that political ‘self-defense’ (i.e. censorship, disinformation) is acceptable as long it’s an appropriate response to a credible threat. How convenient it would be if that threat were omnipresent and mortal to the republic itself.
Hillary Clinton posted a video on Twitter last week cautioning Democrat voters that already, two whole years before the next president is elected, “right-wing extremists” are plotting to steal the next election casting doubt on the future verdict. Her solution? Elect more Democrats so that the democratic process’s legitimacy is once again ensured; enshrining the belief that the only way the people’s will can be carried out dutifully is if they are at the wheel. Most likely after the GOP candidate becomes clear, Republicans will begin to peddle their newest warnings of a fraudulent election as well.
It’s a perennial zero-sum game. After Biden won the presidency in the fall of 2019, the only viable option for Trump and the dignity of American politics - quite the oxymoron - was to concede that he was beaten. It’s immaterial whether or not the process was truly “rigged” as the billionaire continues to assert. If, in reality, the Democrats robbed Trump of the executive office, what amount of testimony and remonstration would be required to convince the other half of America the initial declaration was false? Gallup polling suggests that it would be impossible; data show that partisan voters’ concerns over the integrity of an election are erased the moment their candidate is heralded into office thus restoring their faith in the age-old procedure. So, the moment Joe Biden was established as the victor, it was over. No amount of litigation could have prevented the inevitable upheaval of the maligned party if the outcome had been overturned.
What complicates matters, however, is that the electoral process is compromised as it’s continually fixed by those in power. This year, election commissions in Tennessee and North Carolina have colluded to keep competitive candidates off their ballots, and gerrymandering intent on suppressing a block of voters persists every time state legislatures change color. The Democratic National Convention of 2016 surreptitiously diverted the nomination from Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton, and institutional media disappeared Tulsi Gabbard from the race after she publicly dismantled Kamala Harris. All the while our monolithic social media companies were throttling anything that didn’t align with their approved narrative. But the Biden Administration would much prefer to focus on phantom voter suppression than address real problems of representation. Currently, early voting is open in Georgia for the November elections. Georgia was much disparaged for its voting laws which its detractors were claiming would suppress voters by making the process inconvenient and arduous. The evidence so far, however, belies these claims as early voting numbers are shattering previous records. Yet, White House Press Secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, insists that, still, connivance must be underfoot.
The electoral process may have been the last institution Americans still had faith in. The left has abandoned confidence in the ballot box only to have it replenished when it’s in their favor. No apparatus that is beyond their reach is deemed to be trustworthy as their objection is that it is beyond their reach. The left decries the filibuster and the electoral college as archaic relics of the past but only until those tools offer utility to them again. If the Republican Party is able to flip the house and the senate this midterm, watch talk of abolishing the filibuster evaporate. The Democrat Party repeatedly uses the Supreme Court as a third body of the legislature, but now, as the court has a majority of textualists, the judicial branch is considered compromised and radicalized.
And as far as the right is concerned, best of luck restoring their faith in Biden’s FBI after a spate of arrests that appeared to be politically motivated, the CDC after its inept response to Covid19, or the NIH and the seemingly un-fireable Anthony Fauci.
Due to resoundingly successful mission creep from the left, and despite modest efforts to repudiate the ideology, Americans are now living under a postmodernist establishment. Republicans who have pushed back on critical race theory, a colloquial derivative of postmodernism, have unwittingly embraced the tenets of Foucault by routinely obfuscating truth in order to seize power - accepting the parameters of the contest proposed by the left. American politics now reside on a discursive regime carousel supercharged by the rocket fuel of social media eliciting enough g-force that the electorate is pinned to their seats, unable to get off.
Rival parties continue to make claims and accusations intended to delegitimize the hegemonic structure that undergirds the seat of power their opposition currently sits upon. After successfully doing so, they then try to sit there themselves as if their ascendency is wholly different from their predecessors. Whoever occupies the seat of power is then left with the task of convincing the populace and their opponent that their rule is legitimate. It’s the practical equivalent of pulling the chair out from under yourself every time you try to sit down.
As a result, those in the center - or, more broadly, those who are opposed to authoritarianism - will be stranded in a post-factual existence. While the left and the right will at least have their own set of propositions they accept as truth, the center will toil in the crossfire of a dialogue devoid of reality and therefore, undeserving of participation. The non-partisan center is left the weakest of the three groups as the rules of the game become increasingly difficult to disambiguate so that they’re relegated to the stands. As we hurl into this brave new world of juxtaposing and contradicting certainties, a national divorce isn’t just a likely outcome, it’s a foregone conclusion.
The highly partisan constituencies will continue to suspend their mutual disbelief while the unattached prepare to disembark from the trip altogether. The perceptive divide has reached such proportions that the only way for the American experiment to endure at this point is for the interested parties to do away with the illusion that we are, in fact, living in the same country under the same precepts and let each other carry on constructing their own realities unfettered by competition.
Until then, however, lawmakers and officials are faced with the challenge of carrying on and restoring credibility to the election process in the eyes of their constituents; they mustn’t make matters worse for themselves by undermining these efforts every few years. So, while voters have streamed to the polls this November with tenuous hopes of triumph, they can find solace in this. If their candidate has found themselves on the losing side, it won’t be because their campaign was a failure or because the election results conveyed the will of the people; it will be because victory was snatched criminally from their grasp.
Spot on Forrest, and now begins the circle game.