The Elephant Is Getting Restless

I try not to pay too much attention to US politics but it's getting hard to avoid and even harder not to worry about it. As former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau said about the US back in 1969: "Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt". 

This week has been especially notable with Trump going full fascist in a campaign speech in Vandalia, Ohio last Saturday. I've seen detailed commentary on this from Timothy Snyder, Jay Kuo, and Heather Cox Richardson, as well as what's been reported in the mainstream press, who thankfully are beginning to wake up to the danger presented by Trump.

From Timothy Snyder, who analyzed the speech in detail: 

So, right at the beginning, Americans at the rally are told to identify themselves with people who tried to overthrow an election by force, who are celebrated as "unbelievable patriots."  That is perhaps the most essential element of context to Trump's later reference to a bloodbath.  He has already made clear, in a the collective performance, that violent insurrection is the best form of politics.  Well before he actually used the word, he had instructed his audience that bloodbaths are the right form of politics.  (This is, by the way, not just the context of this rally, but of his rallies generally.)

Snyder has also written an article describing the strongman fantasy behind Trump's appeal to many Americans.  

Quite a few Americans like the idea of strongman rule.  Why not a dictator who will get things done? 

I lived in eastern Europe when memories of communism were fresh.  I have visited regions in Ukraine where Russia imposed its occupation regime.  I have spent decades reading testimonies of people who lived under Nazi or Stalinist rule.  I have seen death pits, some old, some freshly dug. And I have friends who have lived under authoritarian regimes, including political prisoners and survivors of torture. Some of the people I trusted most have been assassinated.

So I think that there is an answer to this question. 

Strongman rule is a fantasy.  Essential to it is the idea that a strongman will be your strongman.  He won't.  In a democracy, elected representatives listen to constituents.  We take this for granted, and imagine that a dictator would owe us something. But the vote you cast for him affirms your irrelevance.  The whole point is that the strongman owes us nothing.  We get abused and we get used to it. 

On another front, Trump's fantasy about winning the 2020 election continues to spread chaos across the US electoral system.

From Rolling Stone:

Across the country — in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania — Republican officials have refused to certify or delayed certification of results for the election of local, state, and national candidates, over debunked claims that mail-in ballots aren’t secure, conspiracies about voting machines, claims of unsecured ballot drop boxes, and myriad other claims rooted in election denier beliefs. 

If local election officials nationwide decide en masse to refuse to certify election results this year, it could slow the certification of statewide tallies crucial to determining the next president — and create chaos.

And from the Washington Post (gift link): 

The scene at the Feb. 28 meeting terrified many Maricopa employees and others who were reminded of what happened after Joe Biden won the county — and, with it, Arizona — in the 2020 presidential race. Back then, Trump supporters used baseless fraud claims to try to pressure or scare elected leaders into changing the results for the metro Phoenix county, which is home to more than half of Arizona’s residents.

Now, with another presidential election quickly approaching and Arizona again likely to be central to Donald Trump’s electoral strategy, the incident late last month has revived fears that officials responsible for running Maricopa County elections will be targeted with a campaign of threats and abuse — or worse. 

The news is not all bad. Jay Kuo believes that there is reason for cautious optimism:

First, as the previous primaries have shown, Trump continues to underperform with voters in GOP primaries relative to how Biden is doing with voters in Democratic primaries. Even with Nikki Haley and the other challengers dropping out of the race, Trump is still losing between one-in-five and one-in-six GOP primary voters to other candidates. And a good chunk of those voters he will never get back.

Second, it appears MAGA either hasn’t learned the lesson of 2022 or it is wholly incapable of changing its spots when it comes to nominating extremist candidates. Those candidates are more likely to lose general elections, but they keep putting them up. In this case, they have nominated another extremist to represent the GOP in the crucial Ohio Senate seat race—a man named Bernie Moreno. He’ll face off against incumbent Sherrod Brown. And from where I sit, our chances of holding the Senate just ticked upward as a result.

Third, while I don’t want to focus too much on polls, I do want to point out two things. To the extent that people care, the national polling averages now show Biden with a slight lead over Trump, who had led in these averages since September. More importantly, within the separate polls over time, many show that voters have moved toward Biden by a few points. While polls are not predictive of final results this far out, it is still useful to see how things have moved relatively within the same poll, even if absolutely speaking, it may be way off.

I do hope that Kuo is right and enough Americans come to their senses that the absolute disaster of another Trump presidency can be avoided. As Jerry Pournelle often commented: "Remember, despair is a sin."