Tag Archives: Voting

Political Postmortem and Forecast

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Like many of us, I read some articles analyzing the recent election. None of them were very surprising. It was noted that, of the one-third of the electorate who voted, many were angry, scared old white people who don’t mirror the electorate as a whole and especially dislike our first black President; our midterm elections favor Republicans, and the electoral map was especially bad for Democrats this year; Americans insist on reelecting their own Senators and Representatives even though they hate Congress as a whole; the average voter is quite ignorant; negative advertising works; and 2016 will be better.

Of the articles I read, I thought this analysis by Andrew O’Hehir was worth sharing. It’s called “Democracy on the critical list: How do we escape this toxic political cycle?” After some painfully entertaining discussion of the election, O’Hehir concludes that “the upshot of all this is that nothing got done in the last Congress and nothing will get done in the next one, but this time the nothing will be a lot scarier to watch”.

He then asks:

Is there any plausible way out of this obsessive, recursive cycle, in which we can expect to see President Clinton 2.0 take office in January of 2017 with a feeble and ineffective Democratic majority, only to be punished for her feminist acts of treason by the resurgent angry white men in 2018, and so on, ad nauseam?

He considers four scenarios:

First, a charismatic, transformational leader will come along who can bring us together, much like some Democrats (apparently including Barack Obama himself) believed President Obama would do. You may remember this scenario from The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which the transformational leader came from another world.

THE_DAY_THE_EARTH_STOOD_STILL_SCREENSHOT_3

Second, the opposition will see the error of its ways and realize the other side was right all along. This is even less likely than scenario #1.

Third, our changing population will move our politics to the left. O’Hehir recognizes that American society is changing, but isn’t convinced our politics will change as a result. As more Hispanics do better economically, for example, they may move to the right. The same thing may happen with today’s younger voters as they grow older. (Personally, I wouldn’t rule this out. Politics tends to run in cycles and there may yet be a progressive reaction to the Age of Reagan.)

Fourth, some cataclysm will lead to the current system collapsing, leading to martial law, mass incarceration, revolution and so on. I think he’s joking when he mentions Senator Ted Cruz losing the Presidency and getting the South to secede. He also considers natural disasters and financial collapse. (One possibility he doesn’t mention is a really bad virus, like the one Obama was supposed to do something about. Its name eludes me.)

Instead of any of these alternatives, O’Hehir thinks it’s more likely that our democracy will simply fade away, as “tiny cadres of the ultra-rich squabble over control of the economy, [while] electoral politics is angrily contested over a narrow but contentious range of lifestyle issues, [driving] away all but the most committed culture warriors on either side….In due course the political stalemate between Republicans and Democrats stops mattering, stops existing and is gone with the wind”.

It’s hard to be optimistic about America’s future. O’Hehir certainly isn’t. The only answer I see is that more people have to start caring enough to pay attention to politics and actually vote. The system still allows for the government to represent the majority of Americans, but only if the majority of Americans wisely choose who their representatives will be.

To Vote Or Not To Vote – An Easy Question

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I always vote and plan to keep voting until the Republicans find a way to stop me. It’s not that I think my single vote will make a difference. It’s almost guaranteed not to. But voting is a ritual of democracy – something we do to participate in and demonstrate our support for our (ailing) system of government. Even though it’s very likely a waste of time.

From Wikipedia:

A ritual “is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and performed according to set sequence”. Rituals may be prescribed by the traditions of a community, including a religious community. Rituals are characterized by formalism, traditionalism, invariance, rule-governance, sacral symbolism and performance….

The field of ritual studies has seen a number of conflicting definitions of the term. One given by Kyriakidis is that a ritual is an outsider’s … category for a set activity (or set of actions) that, to the outsider, seems irrational, non-contiguous, or illogical.

Nevertheless, it would be nice if we practiced more majority rule in this country. Here Ezra Klein answers the question: “How can Republicans be less popular than Democrats yet headed for a landslide?”.

A reasonable person might stay home after reading that, but Mr. Klein believes “There are 9 damn good reasons to go vote today”.

Plus there’s that other important reason he doesn’t mention: It’s a ritual of democracy!

Political Corruption in America, Then and Now

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Zephyr Teachout is a law professor at Fordham University. She recently ran against Governor Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary, a quixotic venture if her goal was to become the Governor of New York. Her more realistic goals included calling attention to Cuomo’s political shenanigans, highlighting ways to improve our politics and maybe selling a few copies of her book (we all have to eat).

The book is Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United. The snuff box was a diamond-encrusted gift that Louis XVI gave to our ambassador to France. “Citizens United” is the recent Supreme Court decision allowing corporations and other organizations to influence elections as much as possible by spending unlimited amounts of money.

From a review of Corruption in America by the journalist Thomas Frank:

Today’s [Supreme Court] understands “corruption” as a remarkably rare malady, a straight-up exchange of money for official acts. Any definition broader than that, the justices say, transgresses the all-important First Amendment. Besides, as Justice Anthony Kennedy announced in the Citizens United decision, the court now knows that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption” — a statement that I guess makes sense somehow in law-land but sounds to the layman’s ear like the patter of a man who has come unzipped from reality….

Our current Supreme Court, in Citizens United, “took that which had been named corrupt for over 200 years” — which is to say, gifts to politicians — “and renamed it legitimate.” Teachout does not exaggerate. Here is Justice Kennedy again, in the Citizens United decision: “The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach. The government has ‘muffle[d] the voices that best represent the most significant segments of the economy.’ ”

You read that right: The economy needs to be represented in democratic politics, or at least the economy’s “most significant segments,” whatever those are, and therefore corporate “speech,” meaning gifts, ought not to be censored. Corporations now possess the rights that the founders reserved for citizens, and as Teachout explains, what used to be called “corruption becomes democratic responsiveness.”

Being “unzipped from reality” aptly describes much of our politics, including a series of decisions by our Republican-dominated Supreme Court.

Did it matter that the Supreme Court helped George Bush get elected in 2000, which made it possible for him to be reelected in 2004? David Cole, writing in the New York Review of Books, reminds us:

… when Justice [Sandra Day] O’Connor announced her retirement and Chief Justice Rehnquist died in office in 2005, President Bush, not Al Gore or a successor, had the privilege of appointing two new justices and shaping the Court for years to come. Had a Democratic president been able to replace Rehnquist and O’Connor, constitutional law today would be dramatically different. Affirmative action would be on firm constitutional ground. The Voting Rights Act would remain in place. The Second Amendment would protect only the state’s authority to raise militias, not private individuals’ right to own guns. Women’s right to terminate a pregnancy would be robustly protected. The validity of Obamacare would never have been in doubt. Consumers and employees would be able to challenge abusive corporate action in class action lawsuits. And Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which struck down regulations on corporate political campaign expenditures and called into question a range of campaign spending rules, would have come out the other way. But it was not to be.

Returning to Thomas Frank’s review of Zephyr Teachout’s book, it’s hard to believe that political lobbying used to be shameful, even criminal, not a multi-billion-dollar industry:

Once upon a time, lobbying was regarded as obviously perfidious; in California it was a felony; and contracts to lobby were regarded as reprehensible by the Supreme Court. Here is a justice of that body in the year 1854, delivering the court’s decision in a case concerning lobbyists and lobbying contracts:

“The use of such means and such agents will have the effect to subject the state governments to the combined capital of wealthy corporations, and produce universal corruption, commencing with the representative and ending with the elector. Speculators in legislation, public and private, a compact corps of venal solicitors, vending their secret influences, will infest the capital of the Union and of every state, till corruption shall become the normal condition of the body politic, and it will be said of us as of Rome —omne Romae venale [in Rome, everything is for sale].”

Well, folks, it happened all right, just as predicted. State governments subject to wealthy corporations? Check. Speculators in legislation, infesting the capital? They call it K Street. And that fancy Latin remark about Rome? They do say that of us today. Just turn on your TV sometime and let the cynicism flow.

And all of it has happened, Teachout admonishes, because the founders’ understanding of corruption has been methodically taken apart by a Supreme Court that cynically pretends to worship the founders’ every word. “We could lose our democracy in the process,” Teachout warns, a bit of hyperbole that maybe it’s time to start taking seriously.

Considering how money pollutes our politics, and how gerrymandering, vote suppression, low turnout (especially among the young and the poor) and the Constitution itself skew the results, the idea that America is an oligarchy, not a democracy, doesn’t sound hyperbolic at all.  

Nevertheless, quixotic or not, I’m still going to vote in a couple weeks for the Democratic candidates for the U.S. Senate (he’s sure to win) and the House (she’s sure to lose), as well as for bail reform and more environmental funding. It’s the least I can do.

How Can You Miss Me If I Won’t Go Away?

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My urge to save the world one post at a time waxes and wanes. Lately, it’s waned.

Its waning could be a response to the daffodils blooming:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

                               — William Wordsworth

But did you know that Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) strikes some of us in the spring or early summer, not in the dark days of winter?

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

                               — T. S. Eliot

Life in itself 
Is nothing 
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs, 
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, 
April 
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

                              — Edna St. Vincent Millay

But first, these messages:

Gravity was nominated for seven Oscars and 97% of the critics on Rotten Tomatoes liked it, but it’s not a good movie. They spent millions and millions making it look great but seem to have thrown the script together over a long weekend. One miraculous escape after another eats away at the suspense. And that capsule should have landed on a giant heap of corn.

it’s a simple fact of arithmetic that one person’s vote hardly ever matters. How many elections are decided by one vote? Since voting makes no sense from a practical perspective, we need to stop thinking of voting in practical terms. Instead, we should view voting as a democratic ritual. Ritual behavior doesn’t have to be practical. If everyone in this country – at least those of us who don’t have to wait in line for hours to vote – treated voting as a symbolic celebration of democracy, something that every citizen just does as a matter of course, we in the majority (those of us who favor less military spending, for example) could make a difference. Accepting that voting is impractical but doing it anyway would be a very practical thing to do.

Glenn Greenwald is one of the journalists selected by Edward Snowden to receive those secret National Security Agency files. Greenwald now has a website called The Intercept. The site includes links to “top secret” documents. For example, there’s a set of slides from the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) called “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations”. It suggests ways to discredit people or organizations by applying “The 4 D’s: Deny / Disrupt / Degrade / Deceive” (apparently, the NSA and GCHQ don’t merely listen; they also manipulate). There are also some light-hearted internal blog posts, like this one from the NSA regarding SIGINT (Signals Intelligence):

So, SIGINT is downright cool! As much as we complain about our “Big Data Problem”, collection/processing issues, dismal infrastructure/outdated browsers/OS’s, our ability to pull bits out of random places of the Internet, bring them back to the mother-base to evaluate and build intelligence off of is just plain awesome!

In conclusion, please don’t expect too much from Gravity, remember to vote, and visit The Intercept. As for everything else, I’ve got nothing (as of now anyway).

Farndale Daffodil Field

We Should Expect Divided Government For a Long Time

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Back in July, I wrote about the unrepresentative nature of the House of Representatives:

The House doesn’t represent the will of the people, because small states are over-represented (some congressional districts are nearly twice as large as others) and recent gerrymandering results in more Republicans being elected than Democrats, even though Democrats get more votes.

What I should have said is that some small states are over-represented and others are under-represented. For example, Rhode Island’s two members of Congress each represent only 525,000 people. Wyoming’s single member represents about 580,000. Yet Delaware‘s one member of Congress represents 925,000 and Montana‘s represents more than one million.

That might be a wash in political terms, because some small states lean left and some lean right. Unfortunately, of the 12 states that have no more than two representatives in Congress, eight lean right and only 4 lean left.

In addition, we shouldn’t forget the District of Columbia, which has more people than Vermont and Wyoming, definitely leans left and isn’t properly represented in Congress at all (they don’t have a senator and their representative gets to talk but not vote). This all adds up to an advantage for the Republicans.

In that post, I also said that gerrymandering resulted in more Republicans being elected to the House in 2012 than Democrats, even though Democrats got more votes. I was right about the numbers: the Republicans received only 47.6% of the total House vote, but ended up with 51.7% of the seats, which resulted in the Republicans having almost total control of the House of Representatives, since the House is run more efficiently (i.e. less democratically) than the Senate.

It might be the case, however, that gerrymandering doesn’t explain the Republicans’ success. That’s not to say the Republicans haven’t done their best to draw Congressional district boundaries to their advantage. They clearly did so the last time they got the chance and did it with more dedication than the Democrats.

Nevertheless, a recent study suggests that the Republicans have a natural advantage in House races. The reason could be that Democrats have gerrymandered themselves by tending to live in big cities, college towns and old manufacturing centers. That’s how gerrymandering works. You try to clump together people who vote for your opponents in as few districts as possible. This creates a few extremely safe seats for your opponents (ideally, they’d get 100% of the vote in a few districts), and a bunch of relatively safe seats for your side. It’s basically voter segregation or ghettoization. By living close together in places like Atlanta, Ann Arbor and Toledo, Democratic voters appear to have put themselves at a natural geographical disadvantage in House races.

The people who did the study claim to have tried out thousands of different district boundaries in 49 states (no Alaska? no Rhode Island?). The results were not encouraging for Democrats or opponents of gerrymandering:

In the vast majority of states, our nonpartisan simulations produced Republican seat shares that were not much different from the actual numbers in the last election. This was true even in some states, like Indiana and Missouri, with heavy Republican influence over redistricting.

It might be possible to counteract this Republican advantage by creating lots of districts that radiate out from the centers of towns and cities and would include a nice mix of urban, suburban and rural voters. The authors of the study seem to discount this possibility. At any rate, their point is that by living in relatively close quarters, Democrats are at a natural disadvantage when it comes to electing members of the House of Representatives.

A reasonable conclusion to draw from all of this is that Congress is even less representative than it seems to be. The Senate was explicitly designed to favor the interests of lightly-populated states, which now tend to vote Republican, while the House exhibits some favoritism toward small states, but more importantly is gerrymandered, whether on purpose or by simple geography, to favor Republicans as well.

The good news is that Democratic presidential candidates may continue to do relatively well, since most people pay at least some attention to politics during presidential elections and most people agree with Democratic policies (progressive taxation, more social spending, less military spending). Democrats who run for President will do well, that is, until they actually have to govern. Then they’ll have to deal with too many Republicans in Congress.