It’s I guess symptomatic of
how fucked up this election is that what Trump is being ridiculed for now is in
fact true – ie that the election is rigged. Understand, I think Trump is a
buffoon who is saying this for merely rhetorical reasons that may indeed be
legitimately considered dangerous and who would gladly accept the results of a
rigged election if they favored him, something which in his profound stupidity
he has openly admitted to. Regardless of all that - he’s right in a sense – and all on the left rising
up in outrage about what he said are disingenuous hypocrites.
The history of democracy is
littered with malfeasance – the founding fathers were clearly acutely aware of
how vulnerable the system was to being hijacked by unreasonable, undemocratic
forces and thus our checks and balances which perch over the Republic as if
fully expecting bad things to happen.
Rigged, depending on how you want to define it, is not absurd – rather the
possibility is indeed baked in – Trump himself is a manifestation of this
insomuch as he’s where he is because of stupid voters, stupidity amounting here
to malfeasance once removed – stupid voters enabled Sanders, they gave us eight
years of an awful Obama, they will give us at least four years of an awful
Hillary and they made Trump possible. That may not be rigged in the sense that
Trump means it – but I see it as rigged all the same.
Democracy is what Churchill
said of it – crap until you compare it to the alternatives. This is true for
one reason: the average voter is not a reliable bastion of knowledge and common
sense and therefore is highly susceptible to being ‘influenced’ in negative
ways and therefore the system is vulnerable to being corrupted by cunning
operatives looking to further an agenda that the electorate is unable to
perceive or even if it does ‘see’ it either cannot understand it or lacks the
motivation or foresight to care about what it ultimately means. Obama’s
opposition to the Iraq war is a perfect example of this. His opposition was not
based on any foreign policy logic – we’ve seen eight years of Obama foreign
policy malpractice and so to think his opposition was the result of some
brilliant insight is absurd - it was all about political calculations – his
political fortunes at the time were utterly dependent on left wing ideologues
who opposed the war and therefore he had
to oppose the war, which was conveniently easy to do since he’s a leftist
ideologue himself who as a matter of course echoed their thinking. Thing is, in
2008 many Americans were tired of war and therefore were willing to give credit
to Obama for having opposed the war without having any understanding of why he opposed the war – and there ya
go, low info voters being guided by their emotions concede to an Obama far left
agenda to curtail and diminish American power that they don’t even perceive –
and that’s how you get eight years of a complete clusterfuck of a foreign
policy.
And the key ingredient to
this mess? The media – you simply cannot conceive of a functioning democracy
without an objective and critical voice bridging the gap between the cunning
operatives and the naive, low info electorate. And we don’t have that. I’ve
been saying for a long time that a biased media will undermine the legitimacy
of a democracy because those on the side not favored by the bias will come to
believe that they have no chance to win and for democracy to work both sides
need to believe they have a legitimate
chance to win. The media is not an objective voice – it has a preferred outcome
– which means the democracy cannot function as it was intended to function.
Add to this legitimacy crisis
how the media directly effects the election itself by influencing, one might
say manipulating, how people perceive things – and of course this is all done
to serve the specific agenda of a favored ideology. This election in particular
has emphasized this dynamic – a professor at I believe NYU specializing in
media studies has broken down the key role media played in building Trump up
during the primary, disadvantaging his opponents severely, and tearing him down
now that the media’s favored candidate needs protecting. A plurality of foolish
GOP voters and now Trump himself played right into this game – I remember
marveling at how Trump’s supporters were naively thrilled by his supposed
ability to ‘control’ the media during the primary without it seems ever
stopping to imagine how that supposed control would be entirely reversed once
Hillary was the opponent.
I’d say that all adds up to a
de facto rigging of elections – not in the sense Trump and his delusional
supporters mean it – but as a war on conservatism in general. As institutions
increasingly lean left, as left leaning media increasingly saturates the
culture, as demographics change to favor ethnicities inherently inclined to
view the world and the role of government in ways that suit the progressives’
agenda, so to does the war open itself up to increasingly effective rigging by
the left. No doubt the stark rise of polarization is a result of this
‘momentum’ – studies have shown how social media is feeding that fire – the
thing to understand about polarization though is that, bad as it is for the
country in objective terms, the left doesn’t think in objective terms and so
polarization serves the interests of the left much more than it serves the interests
of the right – this is because, as Alinsky preached, polarization will promote
ideological purity, an intolerant disease which clearly infects progressive
thinking, allowing the negative forces named above to prosper until the country
is irrevocably driven to the left. You can see this in the way Obama governs –
he clearly has no problem with polarization and indeed as a no doubt true blue
Alinskyite acts to serve the cause in any way he can. The far right and
Trumpsters, as ideological purists themselves, may think they want polarization – but that’s just playing into the
left’s hands [Trump of course is only an ideological purist in the sense that
as a narcissist he himself is the
ideology he prays to – Trump has no political ideology per se other than one
that serves his interests].
The startling thing about
this is how progressives think and act as if splitting the country into two
camps that hate and mistrust each other in order to make room for the eventual
rise of a leftist oligarchy is a process immune to failure, immune to
engendering actions and outcomes antithetical to and disdainful of their
presumed utopia. Very shortsighted – although history clearly demonstrates that
ideological purists are consistent in their embrace of foolishness. Thing is,
we have currently on display two glaring examples of how foolish and misguided
this thinking is: the Obama presidency and the EU. Both profound failures riven
with flaws and incompetence and naïve thinking that have engendered reactionary
forces that threaten the tranquility of their progressive ideal – and both in
denial of this fact. But then that’s idealists for you - not people prone to
imagining themselves wrong – they’re builders of glass houses who simply refuse
to believe in the possibility of an exterior reality tossing stones their way.
[I suppose one could argue
that the far right or alt right realize they can’t win this media war and
therefore a leftist oligarchy is inevitable and therefore too a reactionary
push back is inevitable – and then a civil war or possibly a junta? I suppose
that’s how they might view things and thus don’t see themselves as being played
for fools by the left – indeed, given those terms, it’s the left being play for
fools since if the worst case scenario plays out the military will then be the
key to what happens and we all know who they’ll back. Pretty gloomy stuff – but
I tend to think the dire precipice awaits if the GOP can’t hold onto the House
and hopefully too the Senate – and then maybe you see the rise of an effective
GOP leadership that has learned important lessons from what has happened and
starts the task of rebuilding the party – a good start would be to get rid of
Preibus and replace him with a smart moderate who is a very good in front of
the cameras – Carly Fiorina maybe? She’d be a very good foil to Hillary leaving
Ryan free to heal congress]
