Douthat: democracy, whatever
Ross Douthat is evidently having trouble filling his column quota. Or maybe he’s just confused about the role of public intellectuals and the nature of rational decision making.
In two recent columns, Douthat suggests that Democrats are excessively worried about Republican attacks on voting and election and should just chill out. He defends this “what, me worry?” approach to politics in two ways. First, he argues that there is so much uncertainty about how the future will unfold that Democrats and Republicans who want to preserve democracy do not have a clear strategy to pursue.
This is the point when I’m supposed to tell you which of these three approaches will actually Stop Trump and which will ignominiously fail. But the frustrating truth is that as adaptations to the unprecedented weirdness of the Trump phenomenon, all three attitudes — maximalist, moderate and deliberately inactive — seem somewhat reasonable.
Which means, in our era of guaranteed surprises, that all three will probably be rendered irrelevant by some turn of events between now and 2024.
Second, he suggests that Democrats overestimate the risk that Republicans in Congress and state capitals may refuse to allow Biden to take office in 2024 even if he wins the state-by-state vote for the electoral college. He downplays the ability of Republicans to subvert elections, pointing to Trump’s failure to steal the 2020 election and the failure of the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. Again, the upshot is we should all just take a deep breath:
Which, again, does not make the worriers unreasonable; it just makes their we’re all doomed attitude seem extremely premature.
This is nonsense in so many ways. I will mention two.
First, there are indeed things that Democrats (and sane Republicans) can do to reduce the risk of a democratic disaster. My two priorities would be:
- A massive voter registration effort. This would reduce the risk of a close election and make it much less likely that rogue Republican officials and judges can subvert an election.
- A massive education effort. We should do everything we can to educate voters, politicians, judges, election officials about the importance of free and fair elections. Republican efforts to entrench themselves in power threaten to deprive voters of the ability to turn incumbent politicians out of office, which will make Republicans less and less responsive the public. We should also explain the danger created by apocalyptic Republican rhetoric that makes losing an election seem like an existential crisis to many Republican voters.
Douthat could be contributing to this effort. As a conservative with a column in the New York Times he has both some credibility with Republicans and a large megaphone. But instead of educating voters about the importance of honest elections and trying to counter the overheated rhetoric coming from Republicans and Republican-aligned media, he argues that Democrats should stop worrying about the Republican threat to democracy.
Second, Douthat chastises Democrats for exaggerating the risk of democratic failure in 2024. He seems to suggest that many Democrats believe a stolen election in 2024 is inevitable, but this is obviously nonsense (I note that the sources he links to do not support this claim).
More fundamentally, it is perfectly reasonable to be very worried about a modest risk of a terrible thing happening, especially since there are things that we can do to reduce the chance of disaster. Sensible thinking would focus our attention on what we can do to prevent a disaster, even if the risk of disaster is less than 50%. Generally speaking, drying your hair while soaking in the tub is not a great idea, even if it worked out last time you tried it and is more likely than not to work if you try it again. The fact that democracy survived Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election and may well survive past the 2024 election simply does not justify Douthat’s counsel of complacency.
Douthat is a large part of the reason I will not give that fen paper one penny.
But his is beyond the pale.
Does he imagine that the GA, TX and AZ legislatures went to all the trouble to ratfuck the election results ” legally ” and have no intention to ratfuck the election results ” legally ” ?
If I give him the benefit of the doubt and what he writes is what he believes, there is only one comment I can make about him.
The stupid. It burns.
Never mind the already existing disparities between ease of voting for whites and minorities in many states. If you make something easy, you get more of it, and that has been the case in white vs. minority districts in some states for years. The newest round just exacerbates the issues.
I can’t imagine how any fair look would not see they are designed to eliminate or restrict the ways that minorities use more than whites where ever possible and are blatantly discriminatory on their face. But with the current SCOTUS, who knows what they will choose to see?
There is no point of passing a law if you do not intend to enforce it. So expect that any Democratic wins certified by local election boards will be overturned by GOP legislatures where that is now legal. Expect that people who have voted absentee for years will suddenly find they don’t get a ballot, or their ballot is rejected because their signature has changed over the years or they stopped driving and didn’t get an ID card when their license expired. And all the folks that get a couple of hours off to vote will still get fired because actually voting now takes 3 or 4 hours with an hour of travel time on top, assuming you have transportation. So no problems to be seen at this point, oh no. (adjusted spacing between sentences – Bill)
This is a test. Of the american broadcast system. Two Spaces. Three Spaces.
Enter.
testing
testing
testing
administrator attempt
testing
testing
testing
My testing on the other thread show nothing changed.
Line 2.
Line 3!
Line 4?
Over here I get a different result.
Single spaced.
Double spaced.
Another double spaced.
I put a bunch of test comments on the June 8 Open Thread.
It still messes up the “paragraphs”.
@Rage,Wrong about what? I don’t see any post here from me.
Voting; it’s all The Rage.
Joel,
His error about your non existent post is the most sane part of his comment.
I am confused about the role of pubic intellectuals and the nature of irrational decision making myself. The difference between pandering and philandering should not be assumed significant since in the end we get screwed either way.
No, Trump’s not delusional — it’s actually much worse than that | Salon.com
No, Trump’s not delusional — it’s actually much worse than that
Trump’s Big Lie about the election and fantasies of “reinstatement” aren’t delusional. They’re devious strategies
By ALAN D. BLOTCKY
PUBLISHED JUNE 9, 2021 6:00AM (EDT)
A growing and prevailing view is that Donald Trump has become delusional. His fixed and intractable obsession with his Big Lie is seen as proof of his psychosis.
But Trump is not detached from reality at all. He knows exactly what he is doing. He knows the difference between truth and a lie — he just doesn’t care about that, if a lie gets him what he wants. He is devious, conniving and hell-bent on satisfying his needs, wants and desires at any cost.
Trump’s “delusion” is simply a conspiracy theory that he thinks has gained the most traction with his millions of supporters. His “delusion” is purposeful and intentional: The election was stolen from him; he will be reinstated as president in August (or at some other time); he could run for speaker of the House in order to impeach President Biden; he is likely to run for president again in 2024. He holds onto his “delusion” because it has successfully kept him the cult leader of the aggrieved and the victimized. His “delusion” has made him the pied piper of the Republican Party.
Calling Trump psychotic misses the point. It creates an excuse for a man who deserves none. Trump is a fearful, vindictive, anti-American megalomaniac. It is this combination of features that accounts for his “condition” or “state” since leaving office on Jan. 20.
Trump is terrified because he is looking down the barrel of a long list of potential criminal charges. The empaneling of a grand jury in New York has intensified his worries. He thinks that if he is somehow returned to the presidency, he will be protected from the indictments against him. So he is seeking a way to have the November election reversed through “audits” and spreading the fiction that he will be reinstated to the presidency in August. This is not a delusion. It is the wishful thinking of a humiliated and disgraced ex-leader who, it turns out, may be a criminal as well.
Trump thrives on destroying people who have been disloyal to him. He is actively trying to tarnish the reputations of Republicans who have not supported him. Look who he hates now: Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, Liz Cheney — and the list goes on. His vindictiveness is a far cry from delusion. Who he hates can change instantly, depending on how he perceives the transaction of the moment. McConnell was almost his buddy at one time…
Jesus! That was a F’en shock! That big post worked.
OTOH, the real reason that I agree with Douthat is because I really do not agree with Douthat. Sound twisted? Well you are catching on. Worse then that I agree with The Rage to some extent. Trump’s gang of thugs want a race war which I am all for since after that Trump and his gang of thugs will be no more. Problem solved. Be careful what you wish for.
It does bother me that the white supremacists have been successfully recruiting former military personnel, but I am not convinced that those scoundrels are anything more than non-combatant retired candy-butted lifers rather than brothers-in-arms. At least that is the sort that I have encountered here locally thus far. They present a threatening posture with a faint whiff of chicken manure. That will not be a fight to be won by liberal intellectuals, but our side knows how to execute a switch reversal move when down on the mat.
To be clear when The Rage wrote “The system will be fried and the wealthy will be killed,” then he was still off by lightyears from reality. But The Rage reminds me much of ages past EV comments denizen Anthony Juan Batista. So, when he writes something remotely within the bounds of existing galaxies, then it is worth noting and marking to reality at times, at remote times, but I could not resist this time. Establishment liberalism will be reinstated by the mob with the most active firearms if that becomes necessary. We are a nation of killers despite the efforts of effete pseudo-intellectual snobs to mollify the masses. My Cherokee ancestors can attest to that. White supremacists are a protected species for now, but once it is clear that they can be no more than a destructive pest then they will lose that protection. If there had been more Cherokees or they had more guns earlier on then we would not have had this problem. I am sure that my Cherokee brothers wish they had thought of anti-immigration five centuries ago.
@The Rage,
Only fools want to kill the rich We just want to be their friends and share their wealth. At one time the rich kept racists for pets, but now I believe they plan to release them back into the wild.
The Rage = Bert who has made enough anti-Semite remarks, etc., and warned repeatedly to stop with the remarks to be banned. He just will not stop.
Neoconservatives like Douthat & Bill Kristol are fervent anti-Trumpers, so they get a smidgen of admiration from centrists for that reason. But they are asking for trouble otherwise, making centrists nervous and critical. The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily on your side.
Dobbs: yes.
Ron: if it comes to that. from what i see, it will come to hand wringing. the people with more money always win.
Erik: yes. massive registration effort, and carpooling to the polls. and whatever else it takes to exploit the loopholes in the states new “voting security laws.” and massive education .. at least make the attempt. while waiting for our “leaders” to come up with something.