I’m 63 years old and have been through quite a few elections by now. In all that time, I have never tuned in to monitor the results of the electoral college voting. Not once.
In 2000, the electoral college was not the issue. No one imagined that electors would go in and vote against the certified vote of their respective states. No, the courts were the battleground for that one. There was no enthusiastic statistician on your TV following a giant computer screen as the numbers were slowly revealed from across the country.
But this is 2020.
Electors were let into voting sites by secret entrances. Some voting took place in undisclosed locations. Some electors wore bullet-proof vests on their way to work that day. Electors with no standing crowded around entryways to state capitols insisting they be allowed entrance, only to be held at bay by armed guards.
The MAGA millions insist that the election has been boldly stolen by the Biden camp. It is unclear how that was accomplished. The mechanism for such a thing is nowhere to be found. Sixty lawsuits were filed and 59 failed. One suit in Pennsylvania sought to invalidate some ballots that exceeded a deadline for curing mail ballot ID issues that had been extended by the Secretary of State, Kathy Boockvar. That was their sole victory. The other 59 were tossed with prejudice for a lack of evidence. They were tossed by Democratic judges. They were tossed by Republican judges. They were tossed by Trump appointed judges. It seemed no one was willing to commit professional suicide for the cause.
The last hurrah was the Supreme Court, and surely a stacked deck would come to the rescue, but no. Even the sychophantic Kavanaugh was unwilling to sacrifice his legal credentials to lick the hand that had fed him his career summit. The case brought to them was so ridiculous, so completely without merit, without even the standing to bring it in the first place that there was not an ally on the court to be found.
None of this matters to the believers. I had a conversation with a colleague at work. He loves to insist this isn’t about Trump at all, but about the stealing of an election no matter who won. We had an extended discussion about why he thought this had occurred. This is a man with a degree in psychology, someone with at least an introduction to an American education. We talked for a bit and his argument was easily brushed aside, and to his credit he realized that. But rather than admit that his “evidence” was not a valid indictment of the voting process, he spent the night considering an analogy to present to me the next day. He asked if a salesman could game the companies accounting to make them salesman of the month. I said I didn’t know how to do that but he explained how it was possible and I accepted his premise. Could it be done with no one knowing it, he asked. I doubted that, but he taught me how the game could be played and probably pass by the system. His conclusion was that fraud could be accomplished in the dark with no one knowing anything about it. That was how the lawsuits had failed.
I quickly pointed out that the analogy broke down on several levels. The electoral system that would have to be compromised was arguably the most scrutinized one that exists, the checks and balances within it having exposed many attempts to upend it. The company had little interest in who was salesman of the month as long as money wasn’t being stolen in the process, which it wasn’t, so the chance of it landing in court where his machinations could easily be revealed were essentially nil. That was hardly analogous to an entire population being affected by the outcome of an election in many meaningful ways. Secondly, the canard was accomplished by a single individual, whereas the election being stolen would require thousands of accomplices spread across the country, all with complete secrecy. No whistleblowers allowed.
The dissection of the flawed argument continued, including the question of how Mitch McConnell got elected in spite of the complete control of the election process that was being floated, and when I was through he abandoned it, saying, “Well, it’s just what I believe. I still believe it.”
So there you go. Facts are not effective tools in this battle. Evidence is not relevant. Logical argument is superfluous.
Some christians believe snakes and donkeys talk. Some Muslims believe consummating a marriage with a 9 year old can be a-ok. Trump supporters believe an election can be stolen without leaving a trace.
How do you fight back against an ignorance that not only has self-recognition, but is embraced? Dearly held. When your world view is dependent on ideas that have no objective support, what is the antidote? How do you break through and start the healing?
I have no quick answers.
How do you overcome dogmatism of any kind? It is immune to evidentiary appeals. To overcome dogmatic “reasoning” a study of critical thinking is required which leads to a discusion about an education system that has failed entirely and leads to a solution that requires decades of reform. Hardly a quick fix.
Yet a quick fix is needed. Dogmatism leads to deeply held beliefs that can be so profound to people that they are willing to defend them. The Civil War was a result of the dogmatic assertion that no one had the right to deny states the freedom to enslave human beings. It was clearly stated in the preamble to every single Confederate state’s constitution without exception, and they went and died about it.
Timothy McVeigh was a symbol for today’s dogmatic believers. A dedicated warrior against the perceived overreach of the government, he took matters into his own hands, believing Jefferson to have given him cover in his revolt against tyrants. Second Amendment fetishists believe it to be the seminal, defining feature of the Constitution, calling them to be the cure for a diseased culture. They are receiving support from leaders within the system. Rep. Louie Gohmert used civil war rhetoric as the Democrats in the House formulated their impeachment plans. The President himself re-tweeted a post from “Pastor” Robert Jeffress saying that the impeachment would result in a “Civil War like fracture in the Nation”. Trump would regularly suggest greater violence from his supporters, explaining how protesters used to be dealt with and promising to pay the legal fees for those that struck out against detractors. As recently as the debates leading up to his failed run for reelection, he told the violent Proud Boys who marched on Charlottesville to “…stand back and stand by”. Representative Steve King (R-IA) posted a meme reminding everyone that the red states have “8 trillion bullets” if needed for a civil war. After Texas brought a case to the Supreme Court seeking to disenfranchise the votes of four battleground states, a case it had no standing to bring and was rebuffed, the chairman of the Texas GOP, Allen West, called for secession, stating “Perhaps law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the constitution”.
What is the upshot of this official and semi-official acquiescence to the idea of a permanent division of the United States by any means necessary? Now that there is explicit support for these seditious ideas, militias and “patriot” groups have not seen an uptick, they have exploded. The Anti Defamation League has reported a doubling of militia groups since the election of Barack Obama in 2008, and documented a dramatic increase in far-right violence in 2018, notably paralleling the increased acceptability of hate speech from Trump and his allies.
The Proud Boys have become a part of the national lexicon, having planted their torch in Charlottesville and being given presidential cover for what led to murder in the town. With the President’s help, they achieved a legitimacy among a shockingly large swath of the population. These people vote, and are currently in a state of disbelief that their worldview was defeated. The Boogaloo Bois are another group that nakedly pursue the idea of Civil War, have it as their singular unifying principle while not necessarily agreeing about why they want it. One faction seems to be an extension of the Charles Manson vision of a cataclysmic race war while the other simply want to bring down a government they see as overreaching and oppressive. But the word “boogaloo” is simply a substitute for civil war, for bloody violence against ones countrymen. The underlying reasons seem secondary to the excitement over the violence itself. Substituting a benign sounding, almost child-like word to stand in for bloody, lethal confrontations is allowing recruitment of people who might otherwise be put off by declarations of war. My generation remember the boogaloo as a dance, one that was a celebration of freedom of expression, rejecting a buttoned up repressive past. Now it has been co-opted to preserve a perverted vision of a past America that needs to be reclaimed by any means necessary.
The Electoral College held. A threat of an attempted coup on January 6th is being suggested, but there seems little reason to take it seriously and less reason to imagine it succeeding.
Yes, this election is finally over, but the nightmare may just be starting.