So, how do I regard Election Day, looming up in two weeks? With dread and foreboding, to be absolutely frank – no matter who is declared victorious. It’s absolutely guaranteed that all flaming hell will break out in either case; either within hours/minutes, or in days/weeks.
If the Trump/Vance ticket sweeps to an unmistakable, unarguable landslide well beyond any means of the Democrat Party to fraud – the anti-Trumpists will be insane with baffled fury. The national media establishment will look like Wily Coyote after one of his Acme gadgets explodes – and the entrenched bureaucracy crusted like layers and barnacles all over the various federal government departments … they will see the end of their comfortable gravy train. Ruin, disgrace, impoverishment, possibly criminal charges. The Diety knoweth and the various conservative-sympathetic bloggers and commenters, to include many fellow Chicagoboyz essayists and frequent commenters remember very well how blatantly they played dirty pool the last time around. What would they venture this time against the Great Orange One, the avatar of their doom … Political assassination? Of him, or any of his allies? At the height of what some commenters have termed a second civil war? Like Lincoln, at the hands of an angry partisan of the losing side? Sadly. I wouldn’t put it beyond the realm of possibility. This will be bad. Very bad.
That’s uncharted waters, in modern American politics – although not unknown in South America, or Europe of the early 20th century. Americans did not routinely do things that way, and since 1865, we had rather prided ourselves on that record of relatively peaceful turnover between parties. Not that assassination of various notable American politicians hasn’t happened – but most usually at the hands of the freelance nutters. In this present overheated political atmosphere, we can be assured that an assassin would be made a hero/heroine (overtly or covertly) by the media, academic and intellectual elite. Anyone with eyes to see must know this and also acknowledge that Trump fans and voters generally would be made … very unhappy by such a turn of events. How unhappy? That’s one of those things that I dread finding out. Even if a political assassination is not in the cards – the Harris/Walz partisans and the party supporting them will take every opportunity to be obstructive, and even more vicious and nasty than ever before. Witness the current slime vented by the Atlantic Magazine, which used to be a respected publication.
The Harris/Walz combo achieving a win on November 4th, possibly through an overwhelming flood of ballot farming and fakery in various districts particularly vulnerable to such … bald, undisguised fraud, giving the win to Kamala and Elmer Fudd; this will absolutely inflame Trump voters, for all that we can do about in the immediate aftermath. We learned a hard lesson of January 6th; likely those of a mind to criticize the outcome won’t be so eager to go to Washington to protest openly and run the chance of experiencing debilitating lawfare and interminable imprisonment in a Washington DC gulag, pending trail by a biased jury and a corrupted justice system. But Trump voters will be infuriated. Deeply angry – and the cohort which engineered a victory for Kamala-walla-bang-bang and Tim the Tampon Man will not rest easy in that victory. They will be insecure, suspicious and ready to lash out at any perceived threat or defiance of Federal government authority, likely with disproportionate violence. Those states which succeeded in maintaining a sane and competent governance in accordance with the votes and desires of the majority of their residents may manage to stand against rounds of Fed-gov madness.
It will all be very interesting reading in history books, assuming that any detached and relatively non-partisan accounts will be written in future.
Two more weeks. Hope for the best and prepare for the worst, I guess. Comment as you wish – how does it all look from where you are standing?
Here in Colorado we get mailed ballots and can either mail them back or take them by hand to a ballot box. Mine is done, and when my wife and daughter finish theirs I [and maybe “we”] will take them to the County Clerk’s office to drop them off in the ballot box. After I drop them off, I intend to salute the ballot box, because I rather suspect that it will be my last chance to vote in a supposedly legitimate election.
For an election to be functionally legitimate and to give consent of the governed and a mandate for those in the seats of power to govern; a large majority of the population [voting or otherwise] have to believe in the legitimacy and integrity of the election process itself. As a lifelong amateur historian and political scientist, I would guess that you probably need 90%+ of the population to believe in the honesty of the process to hold the Social Contract together. The collapse of a Social Contract is almost always a kinetic and untidy process.
Looking at our poor country, with its situational concept of the rule of law, I would figure at best that 25-33% do not believe in the integrity of the political process and more likely over 50%.
My father came to this country alone from China, 12 years old, not speaking English, just before the Depression started; at a time when under American law Chinese were specifically not protected by the law or the Constitution. In 1943 the exigencies of war forced the US government to make Chinese here legally people. By that time my dad spoke English, was just shy of 30 years old, working in a good defense job for the Army Air Corps, and totally exempt from the draft. He so believed enough in this country and what it stood for that he gave all that up and immediately enlisted in the Army to defend it. He earned his US citizenship in Patton’s 3rd Army as a SGT leading a squad of infantry. He believed in the actuality and potential of America enough to do that.
Today, only 80 years later, possibly a majority of Americans born here cannot believe that.
Subotai Bahadur
I am pretty certain that in my part of Texas, the polls are pretty strict with requirements, and that in Texas we can mostly count on the integrity of the election process… but for those vulnerable polling places … cannot hold out much hope, really.
I so hope that I am not living in the last shadows of a fading age, before it all goes down into darkness again.
Not only am I too old to put up with this sh*t, I have Wee Jamie the Wonder Grandson to consider.