O.T. Ford

  — O.T. Ford

Reasons I wouldn’t want campaign help from Russia, from most important to least important: 1. The Russian régime is tyrannical, murderous, and corrupt. 2. It would want something in return. Something bad. 3. I wouldn’t want to be known as the candidate Putin likes. 4. It might be illegal. As the Trump administration, campaign veterans, and Republicans in general defend Trump and his various associates, the focus is now heavily on whether any laws were broken, or whether such laws even apply to the president. But if legality is your defense here, you’re demonstrating clearly that you never understood the problem to begin with. You never really understood liberal democracy. You also don’t understand impeachment. Congress can impeach and remove the president for anything it chooses. Working with a known enemy of the United States to win an election surely qualifies. — O.T. Ford

Nick Clegg and his party, the Liberal Democrats, have been burned by two plebiscites — fittingly, as he was responsible for both in a significant way. As an institution, the Liberal Democratic Party may have no greater interest than electoral reform. Without it, the party will never have true power, because it falls victim to the merciless logic of first-past-the-post, the current electoral system in which the candidate finishing first is elected, even without a majority. Such a system tends towards polarization between two major parties, in a zero-sum game based on the fear of a wasted vote. The Lib Dems, not being one of the two major parties, must generally convince voters to gamble on them. That would not be the case in a ranked voting system, where voters could rank the Lib Dems first, and, should the Lib Dem candidate be unable to win, have their vote go to their second choice instead. When the 2010 general election left no party with a majority of seats, the Lib Dems, who had done well, were in the kingmaker position, able to form a majority coalition (in both seats and votes) with either the Conservatives, under David Cameron, or Labour, under sitting prime minister Gordon Brown. Brown reportedly offered the Lib Dems a ranked voting system — if they joined with Labour in government, both parties would create the system in parliament, on a whipped (required) vote.* Cameron, whose Conservatives finished first, offered merely a referendum on ranked voting, which the Conservatives would then work to defeat. It was Clegg who drove the decision to take the Tory offer, in part because of the psychological effect of first-past-the-post: by finishing first, the Tories were seen to have “won”, and it would have been painted as undemocratic to give power to Labour, who “lost”, despite the fact that either coalition would have had a majority and the Labour-LD coalition was ideologically more coherent — Clegg’s views notably excepted. The Lib Dems took the Tory offer, the referendum was held, neither major party supported it (since they clearly benefit from the status quo), and it was defeated. The Lib Dems’ best chance at a different future was dead. As a group of voters, the Liberal Democrats may have no greater interest than European integration. They are the most pro-European Union of the English parties. The party’s lineage is center-left, and its voters don’t really care for the Tories; if they did, they’d vote for them. By joining the 2010-5 coalition with the Tories, Nick Clegg struck two blows against the Lib-Dem policy of European integration. The first is that, in the run-up to the 2015 vote, Cameron felt safe in offering a referendum on British exit from the EU (an exit he personally opposed), because he expected to need the Lib Dems in coalition again, and to let the Lib Dems “veto” the referendum as a condition of continued coalition. The second blow is that Clegg turned off a lot of Lib-Dem voters, who were not interested in Tory government, Tory austerity, or Tory euroskepticism. The Liberal Democrats were punished badly in the 2015 election — and the Conservatives, thanks partly to the Lib-Dem collapse, were able to form a majority coalition alone. Cameron then called the Brexit referendum and lost. And while the Lib Dems attempted to position themselves, in the 2017 election, as the best party to prevent a complete break with Europe — the hard Brexit — the first-past-the-post logic still holds. Part of Labour’s surge to a strong second in this election was probably due, despite Jeremy Corbyn’s hostility to the EU and his sabotage of the referendum, to the fact that only Labour is a plausible alternative to the Conservatives in England. Far from capitalizing on pro-EU sentiment, the Lib Dems have lost vote share again (though gained in seats; Lib Dem fortunes depend greatly on the unpredictability of first-past-the-post). Clegg gave up his leadership after the bad result in 2015. Cameron stepped down from the premiership and then parliament altogether after the Brexit loss. And the partnership saga ends, in the first post-Brexit poll, with Clegg losing his own seat. Cameron’s too-clever attempt to co-opt the euroskeptic vote ended in disaster for Britain, and for him. He deserves to be remembered more for that disaster than for any good he did. But spare a thought for Nick Clegg. He misjudged his voters and his country, made a really bad decision, and all Britain is paying for it. — O.T. Ford * This was later denied by Clegg. It’s fairly easy to believe, though. Referenda are actually rare in British politics, parliament is supreme, and ranked voting, which Labour had supported itself in the past, was a small price to pay for continuing in government.

— O.T. Ford

Russia did not just try to influence voters in 2016. It also — as Trump opponents have speculated — tried to control the vote tally. The National Security Agency has apparently confirmed that fact, reported by the Intercept, by arresting NSA contractor employee Reality Winner over the leak behind the story. According to Mark Warner, ranking Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, Russia did even more than the Intercept story suggests — a broader attempt on a larger number of states. Whoever leaked the NSA story — Winner has reportedly confessed — committed a crime and should be tried for it. We elect governments to handle security, and do not delegate the release of classified information to the NSA, let alone its contractors. Nonetheless, there are two major differences between Winner’s case and the two blockbuster previous cases that suggest that she is much more deserving of sympathy and much more likely to have done us a service. I have, from the start, been opposed to the actions of Ed Snowden and Bradley/Chelsea Manning, taken as a whole. The main reason I opposed both Snowden and Manning is that their releases of information were indiscriminate. Leftist support is particularly galling in the case of Manning, since she undermined diplomacy and thus hurt everything her leftist enthusiasts claim to care about — jaw-jaw, not war-war. Snowden almost certainly gave the Chinese and the Russians more than the public will ever see. His claim to be a crusader for public information, a whistleblower, is not consistent with the totality of his actions. In fact, he has acted, in exile, as a freelance spy working against the West. Both Snowden and Manning, to say nothing of Julian Assange, seem motivated less by a desire that the US public should know the bad things its government is up to, and more by an animus to everything that government does. The US has real enemies and legitimate secrets from them. Snowden, Manning, and Assange see it otherwise. My skepticism has been rewarded; I was opposed to WikiLeaks and Assange from the beginning, condemning among other things Assange’s relationship with Russia, years before they revealed themselves to others as anti-liberal, anti-US, pro-Russian stooges. It’s not often that I can claim that degree of prescience. Reality Winner, by contrast, has released, so far as we now know, only the story of Russia’s attempt to change our votes, and less, per Warner, than the government actually knows. Russian attempted hacking of the actual vote is a subject of obvious public interest that by itself does no harm to legitimate US government interests. The report in the Intercept was redacted at the request of the NSA to protect sources and methods. Given that, it’s hard to understand why the remaining material is information we can’t see — the US public, or the global public watching along with us. In fact, our allies’ publics have as much interest in this as we do, since their election systems are being targeted as well, or will be. Contrast that with Manning exposing candid internal diplomatic advice for its gossip value, or Snowden exposing actual anti-terrorist programs. The second factor that distinguishes Winner from Snowden and Manning is the person who controls classification. It’s not just that Trump has shown that he cannot be trusted with classified material in a general way, as when he burned an Israeli source within ISIS to impress the Russians. It’s that he has no standing to judge what should be classified and a specific conflict in this case. Donald Trump was “elected” in shady circumstances depending heavily on improper assistance. His popular-vote loss, and assistance from Russia, WikiLeaks, and Jim Comey, already taint his legitimacy as the classifier-in-chief. His manifest incompetence and disengagement does not affect his political legitimacy but does affect his moral legitimacy. But just as importantly, his government is patently corrupt, and has a clear conflict of interest on the Russia story. The Trump administration does not want the public to know what Russia did during the election. It has forcefully denied what the US intelligence community is unanimous in concluding — that Russia specifically worked to get Trump elected. It has fired Comey for investigating the possibility of Trump’s collusion with Russia during the election. This story of Russia’s attempts on our vote count would almost certainly have been buried on “national security” grounds, as a pretext to protect the president’s image, at a minimum. It is all too believable that Trump and his administration would allow Russia to influence future elections to their benefit, and would not want to expose the operations doing so. Trump and his circle are the sleaziest side of US politics, with no respect for democracy. Based on what we know at present, I hope Reality Winner spends the minimum time in prison, and is remembered as a more-principled example of what her overlauded predecessors are mistakenly thought to be. — O.T. Ford

Being Secretary of Defense is incredibly important, with great responsibilities not only for readiness but in times of actual war, so I am grateful (at the moment) that Jim Mattis, who appears to take the job seriously and knows how to do it, agreed to work for Donald Trump. I have no such feeling about Nikki Haley. She is better than many alternatives, but in the end is just another servant of Donald Trump, and should be remembered as such when her time in Trumpworld is over. The US ambassador to the United Nations is a marginal position of limited influence. It has been included in the “cabinet” since Bill Clinton’s administration, mostly because his first ambassador was a woman and he wanted to count more women in his cabinet. Being part of the “cabinet” doesn’t amount to anything other than photo ops in the cabinet room. The US doesn’t have cabinet government like, for instance, Israel, and its one presumed power, to declare a president incapacitated, is actually assigned by the Constitution to “the principal officers of the executive departments”, of which the UN ambassador is not one, or “such other body as Congress may by law provide”, which it has not done. The United Nations itself isn’t particularly powerful, a talking shop with exactly as much influence as the member states allow it, and our ambassador belongs, like all ambassadors, to the US State Department, subordinate to its secretary. Haley gave up a governorship for this position, and did it at the invitation of the worst president the majority of us can imagine. Haley had originally opposed Trump, before indicating she would vote for him to stop Hillary Clinton and the Democrats — the shameful position of many Republicans and one that (like so many other factors in an 80,000-vote win) allowed Trump to take a high office for which he was manifestly unqualified. Since becoming ambassador, Haley has behaved in most respects like a standard Republican from the non-isolationist wing in a foreign-affairs post. That’s better, to be sure, than representing the Trump-Bannon nationalist ideology as an alternative might have done. But where many administration officials have been forced to lie for Trump, she has mostly been lying about him. Mattis and national security adviser H.R. McMaster have significant power, so when they go abroad and assure allies that things will not be as bad as Trump’s bombastic rhetoric and angry tweets suggest, they are in a position to back that up at least to an extent. Haley does the same but without any power to support it. She constantly pretends that Trump holds an acceptable policy position when he makes perfectly clear that he doesn’t. I, too, wish that Donald Trump were concerned for human rights and willing to act in their defense. But he is not. Haley and I both know that, as surely do most of her interlocutors at the UN. She says otherwise nonetheless. She is independent, but only for show; she is insubordinate, but in a way that accomplishes worse than nothing. By misrepresenting Trump’s commitments, she is creating the possibility of reliance on action that will never come. Probably no one relies that much on anything out of the United Nations. But what if they do? Perhaps Haley will serve out Trump’s term, and perhaps she will be fired for insubordination. If the former, then she probably knuckled under at some point, and in any case she was no more than the decent face of a noxious cabal. If the latter, she is still accountable for her decision to serve in the first place, and the only thing she can do to redeem herself partially is to challenge Trump in the 2020 primaries. If she does not, then any future campaign in which she claims to have been opposed to Trumpism will be worth not the slightest credit. The time to oppose Trump was when he asked her to put a shine on his crusade of hate and incompetence; and she said yes. — O.T. Ford

Is it really asking so much for pundits and journalists to think through their Trump complaints before committing them to print? Some recent examples: Complaint: Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak, the shadowy character and rumored spy interacting with Trump campaign members last year, was present at an Oval Office meeting between Trump and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov. Reality: Kislyak is the ambassador. His entire job is to meet with our government. It’s standard for the ambassador to be present when his superior is meeting with the president. The problem with Kislyak meeting with the Trump campaign last year is that they weren’t the government; that doesn’t apply to Trump now. And there is no difference between talking to a Russian spy and talking to a Russian ambassador; anything interesting you say is still in the hands of the Russian government. Actual bad things: Trump met with Lavrov at all, despite previous US efforts to isolate and sanction Russia for its actions in Ukraine — and the United States. The White House banned domestic press from the meeting but allowed Russian photographers, who were not vetted and later published photographs, causing an angry reaction from the White House. During the meeting, Trump dropped highly-classified information. Then the three of them enjoyed a good laugh. The intel Trump revealed was not US information; it was provided to us by an ally, whom the Russians and their allies in the Assad régime will now likely identify. The common saying in the intelligence community that all government secrets are “the president’s secrets” is never actually true, but even less true when those secrets belong to a partner. Complaint: Trump sent his former personal bodyguard, Keith Schiller, to fire FBI director Jim Comey. Reality: Schiller delivered a letter to FBI headquarters. It was an errand. What kind of person do you send on an errand? Someone you trust, but whose job is not particularly cerebral. A former bodyguard who handles Oval Office business is just the guy for that. Actual bad things: Trump fired Jim Comey while Comey was investigating Trump’s campaign, his subordinates, and possibly Trump himself. Comey had just requested more resources for his investigation. Earlier, Trump had dinner with Comey and asked for personal loyalty, and threatened Comey with tapes of the dinner conversation after his firing to keep him quiet. Trump has surrounded himself with unqualified persons based on their personal loyalties to him. Schiller recently revealed the secretary of defense’s personal phone number on a post-it note in a photograph. Complaint: When Trump has guests in the White House dining room, he gets special food, including two scoops of ice cream for himself, when everyone else gets a standard meal, and just one scoop. Reality: Trump was eating in his own dining room. The kitchen knows his preferences and accommodates them. There was nothing wrong with the standard meal; it’s probably a good idea not to give out two scoops of ice cream on top of pie as part of the standard meal — less waste, fewer calories. Actual bad thing: Trump doesn’t bother to find out what his guests’ special preferences are, even though he has a large staff and budget and could easily accommodate them. Actually, this last item is so pointless and silly that we don’t have time for it. Trump is dropping other people’s secrets to the Russians while firing the guy who’s investigating how the Russians put Trump in the White House. Let’s keep our eyes on the ball. — O.T. Ford

One of the big stories of recent British politics is the movement of Labour voters, particularly of the working class, to nationalist causes, namely UKIP and Brexit. This was famously mirrored a few months after the Brexit vote by the white working class in the US, voting for Donald Trump, among both previous non-voters, and previous Democratic voters. Tory voters moved to UKIP as well; but this is less surprising, since the Conservatives are more clearly a nationalist party. What happened with the Labour vote? UKIP served as a bridge for the identity transformation of the white, native-born working class in Britain. There had been English ethnonationalist parties before, such as the National Front and the British National Party. But UKIP was the first socially-acceptable English ethnonationalist party. Social pressure works; the BNP was marginalized for its far-right views, as it should have been. UKIP, which moderated the nationalist line, changed the cultural and political landscape of Britain. English ethnonationalism became socially acceptable, and then a major electoral force. Though UKIP never secured a large representation in parliament, this was only because of its even national distribution of votes. In a system with geographical constituencies and numerous viable parties, parties are rewarded for having their vote concentrated. UKIP finished the last general election as the third largest in total votes, but far behind others with favorable vote distributions. UKIP earned 12.6% of the national vote, but only one seat. In fact, its vote share more than quadrupled from 3.1%, but its seat total actually dropped, from two to one. By contrast, the Liberal Democrats won 7.9% and eight seats, the Social Democratic and Labour Party in Northern Ireland won .3% of the vote and four seats, and the Scottish National Party won 4.7% and fifty-six seats. An independent in Northern Ireland won a seat with 17,689 votes; UKIP got the same number of seats but with 3,881,129 votes. This is undemocratic; but UKIP won in the end. In an effort to keep euroskeptics from leaving the Tories for UKIP, Conservative prime minister David Cameron adopted a skeptical stance himself, leaving the EU’s main conservative parliamentary grouping for a new mildly-nationalist one, and promising to hold a referendum on EU membership. The former was a small self-inflicted wound; the latter was one of the greatest self-inflicted wounds in recent political history. Cameron expected to win the Brexit vote. In losing it, he ended his career, and deservedly so. Before UKIP, the native-born English working class voted for Labour, the party of trade unions, as an expression of its class identity. The Conservatives were the party of toffs and bosses. But, rightly or wrongly, the English working class saw its interests threatened by the European Union and the free movement of workers and immigration scheme that came with EU membership. This was aggravated by the admission of poorer Eastern European states in 2004 and 2007. It was then aggravated further by the refugee crisis following the Arab Spring, and the ensuing wars in Syria and Libya. UKIP surged in the 2015 vote. Much of the working class saw its primary identity not as workers but as English ethnonationalists. And on the day of the Brexit referendum many working-class areas of England that had stuck with Labour in 2015 nonetheless voted for Leave, and pushed it over the top. With Brexit’s win, where do English ethnonationalists go? UKIP was a message party, and the message was received. UKIP could be a governing party; but to govern, it would have to win seats, which it had proven so far unable to do. UKIP voters seem to have made a strategic calculation. The Conservatives are in power, and they are hellbent on implementing Brexit, even if the EU won’t negotiate a favorable deal. Even before Brexit, the Tories had been moving in UKIP’s direction to head off its further rise. The Conservative Party was always the more nationalist of the two largest parties, and it has now embraced that identity fully. David Cameron opposed Brexit, and in that he was a miserable failure. But he also wanted his party to become the home of ethnonationalism, and there he has been a marvelous success. — O.T. Ford

Aung San Suu Kyi was probably not as heroic in opposition as she was taken to be; and she is probably not now as disappointing in power as she is starting to be taken, either. Perfection doesn’t exist and we can’t expect it. Suu is human — just as are her newly-anguished critics. For some reason, the Rohingya have become a global cause célèbre. I don’t dispute that they are being badly mistreated in general, that they have endured genuine atrocities, or that they deserve just treatment or attention. All of these things are true; but the attention they are getting in the West is rare and not solely explained by their plight. There are many equally-important causes that are largely ignored, many equally-suffering peoples. As the Rohingya are Muslims in a non-Muslim-majority state, I certainly would expect this kind of special attention from the Muslim world. And perhaps there lies the answer for the West as well. The educated opinionmakers in the West are selective about minority rights and minority suffering, but a Muslim minority outside the Muslim world always holds special interest. It’s possible that Suu does not care about the Rohingya, or largely agrees with their treatment. To conclude that based on current evidence is a mistake, though. It represents ignorance of Burmese politics. First, Suu may have done too little, but she has not done nothing. She has established a commission, headed by Kofi Annan, that has the power to draw further attention to the problem — essentially an act of self-shaming. Her government has begun issuing residency cards to Rohingya and considering their eligibility for citizenship; rather than force the Rohingya to accept designation as “Bengali”, the new government has omitted ethnicity entirely from the cards. Suu herself heads a committee on Rakhine State (where the Rohingya live), covering conflict and internal displacement. This is not much, and it is not particularly satisfying. To hear Suu speak on the subject, she sounds like a politician trying to keep everyone on side, including nationalists. And a politician she certainly is. You don’t have to admire that. But you do have to understand the second and more important point: Suu is not a dictator. She is not even the leader of a democracy. She is the most visible official in a semi-democratic state, the leader of the democratic portion of a rigged semi-democracy. Suu is not so much as the institutional head of government — the president — because the military junta that wrote the current constitution specifically barred her from the job. Her party, the National League for Democracy, controls the parliament and used its power to create her current role as state counselor. And the junta, before handing off a degree of power that allowed Suu to assume her current position, gave itself autonomy in security matters. Suu is unable to restrain the military in Rakhine State even if she desperately wants to. The military is not acting under her authority and does not need to. The military has also reserved for itself one quarter of the seats in parliament. That alone is a constraint on the NLD’s power; it must always contend with the threat to its own power from the military contingent in parliament, which represents a permanent, undiminishable nationalist-reactionary opposition that can ally with defectors from among the elected parliamentarians at any time. The presence of the military in parliament means that the National League for Democracy cannot even have the power it does have, cannot have control over the non-security elements of government, unless it wins more than two-thirds of all elected seats. I defy any handwringing democrat in the West to put together a supermajority of that size from their own societies that would uphold the Western democrat’s own ideals. In fact, the Burmese should be presumed to be as nationalistic, as chauvinistic, as any population, and, given their scant experience with modern liberalism, probably a great deal more. And yet it was the US that elected Donald Trump, the Austrians who gave far-right candidate Norbert Hofer half their vote, and the French who gave Marine Le Pen more than a third. And while a multiethnic state with a secular, nonethnic governmental orientation is the expectation of the educated opinionmakers of the West, it is not a majority expectation much of anywhere. The Burmese popular attitude towards the Rohingya, that they are Bangladeshis (or Bengalis), not Burmese, is only wrong from the perspective of multiethnic territorial states. The Rohingya are in fact part of the same cultural group that dominates Bangladesh. The Rohingya are Indo-Aryans, who dominate not just Bangladesh, but India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and the Maldives. All of them except the islanders exist in a single continuum of land and dialect to which the Rohingya belong at the far eastern end. As Muslims, the Rohingya share the religion of most Bangladeshis (most Burmese are Buddhists); and their dialect would be closely related to, probably mutually intelligible with, those Indo-Aryan dialects just across the border in Bangladesh. The Rohingya gain their special sympathy in part from the power and history of names, and from living in a part of the world about which Westerners have a limited knowledge of peoples and histories. ‘Bangladesh’ is a new name to the world (though not locally). The name ‘Indo-Aryan’ is essentially unknown to Westerners; ‘Indian’, which might have substituted, is now used only for residents of the Indian Republic, and for the unrelated aboriginals of the Americas. The West sees the Rohingya as a distinct people, disenfranchised and ostracized in their land. For people who don’t share the Western educated ideal of a multiethnic territorial state — say, the majority of ethnic Burmese — the Rohingya appear with justification to be Bangladeshis. Perhaps Suu could do more to change that perception, and perhaps she couldn’t; but the idea that she must devote and risk her power on that issue is something you believe only if you think her chief responsibility is to your own ideals, and not to Burma. Hillary Clinton lost in part because she wouldn’t pander to people’s prejudices, because she insisted on the worth of minority interests while her opponent inflamed racial and cultural resentment. After Clinton’s loss, there has been much discussion of how she should have attended more to the small-town and rural whites who gave her opponent such a boost in large parts of the US, should have tried to understand what looks like prejudice instead of showing contempt for it and catering instead to minority views — how her “identity politics” campaign cost her the election. I believe she made the right call; but imagine if, instead, she needed two-thirds of the vote and the US had basically no experience with liberal democracy. And imagine further that the consequence of failing to get a two-thirds vote is that the military would have full control of the government, and that the military were actively trying to control the government while appearing otherwise. This is what the military is doing in Burma, and it is the same military that is oppressing and committing atrocities against the Rohingya. I’m not saying that Aung San Suu Kyi is playing this issue so that the NLD can win and then help the Rohingya. She’s doing it so that the NLD can win and then gradually claw power away from the military and return it to the people at large. Building a democracy is not easy and not always pretty, and there are going to be lots of compromises, and even in an existing democracy, there are lots of compromises, because voters are individuals, not part of a monolith. Suu hasn’t done what you want with regard to the Rohingya because she must take into account the entirety of Burma. You, on the other hand, solely take into account the only two things about Burma that you know: Aung San Suu Kyi and the Rohingya. — O.T. Ford NOTE: This article was published 2017 May 11, eight days before an article in Foreign Affairs that used some similar language (notably, to my title) and made a few similar points, albeit with very different facts. The length of the Foreign Affairs editorial process — and my own obscurity — make it likely that the author, Tej Parikh, was writing completely independently of me. I just want to note for the record that I was also writing completely independently of him. The closeness in dates and the prominence of Foreign Affairs might lead a reader to assume (without checking the dates) that the publishing order was reversed, and that I was borrowing from Parikh’s article. This is false. My article came first, and has not been edited, apart from adding this note on 2017 June 5.

Before we’re asked to extend sympathy to one more Trump voter facing a health-insurance crisis from the repeal of Obamacare, we should remind ourselves what Trumpism is. Donald Trump’s campaign was completely dependent on a lack of sympathy, for immigrants, gays, women, Muslims. It was a vehicle for targeting anger towards undeserving or unacceptable groups and a backlash in part at even being asked to show sympathy for them, which is dismissed now as “identity politics”. The campaign’s most prominent message was a rhetorical middle finger to immigrants, Hispanics, and the neighbor supposedly dumping them on us. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, ran a campaign built on sympathy; her theme ‘Stronger together’ was meant to suggest that all groups, including groups that are normally left out of our society or our prosperity, can actually contribute to that success, and that we should help those who need help. If Trump voters valued sympathy, they had a clear choice. They chose anger and resentment. The fact that any informed voter could have seen that Hillary’s policies were better for that part of the white working class underserved by the pre-Obama healthcare system is beside the point. The Trump voters told us that sympathy is not among their values. And Trump’s final victory depended as well on Republicans who might otherwise have rejected Trumpism within the party, but adhered to the party even with Trump as the nominee because of policies that are decidedly unsympathetic to women, gays, and the poor — that is, because they oppose abortion rights and birth control, because they believe homosexuality is gross or an abomination, or because they want lower taxes for themselves and are glad to sacrifice social services in that cause. And then we should remember the campaign against Obamacare. We already know that a significant portion of whites will reject a given welfare program if there is any reason for them to think blacks (and other minorities, but especially blacks) benefit from it disproportionately (or in some cases, at all). Of course, as long as blacks are disproportionately poor, they ought to benefit disproportionately from any means-tested and competently-designed program. Obamacare, though a compromise, was competently designed, and provided greater benefits for those with fewer means; but it was especially useful for the working class, white, black, or otherwise, who were not served by the existing Medicaid program and not served well by the employer-based system for the middle and upper classes. The opposition to Obamacare was driven by opposition to Obama himself, and welfare in general, not a principle-based critique of its structure. The Tea Party was ultimately a cultural-racial backlash against a black Democratic president coupled with a recession so deep that it was blamed on a president and party who had just been swept to power by the same recession. Many opponents of Obamacare benefit from Medicare; they either don’t know that Medicare is a government program, or aren’t willing to see other people get government health insurance that they are secure in. Many other opponents of Obamacare benefit from Obamacare itself, but don’t know that state programs (like Kynect) are Obamacare. That’s not really an excuse, though; like the Medicare recipients, they are opponents of convenience to any government programs other than the ones they themselves benefit from. They are incapable of feeling for others who have a need that they themselves momentarily lack. That is to say, they do not feel sympathy. Anyone who has seen a Trump rally knows that the Trump movement is a raging mob. I have never before been told to feel sympathy for a raging mob. I do not counsel Schadenfreude or gloating. But we Trump opponents told his eventual voters in every conceivable way that he was a faithless liar wedded to the GOP’s plutocratic ideology. They vented their anger not just at the people who will be fellow victims under Trumpism, but at us, the people who were trying to warn them — scorning us as a depraved cultural elite and dishonest mainstream media. We’re a democracy; we have honored the rules and given power to their choice, and they as well as we are going to have to live with it. As adults, they get to vote, but as adults, they do not get a claim on my pity when their own vindictive choices turn against them. I’ll save my sympathy for the victims who aren’t responsible for this crisis, and if Trump voters don’t like their current situation, they can tell it to Congress, or tell it to Trump. — O.T. Ford

What makes Rich Lowry so naïve? Or if he is not naïve, what makes him think the rest of us are? Lowry’s case for Neil Gorsuch presumes the Republican mythology/talking point that conservative judges are impartial interpreters of objective law. This was probably never true, but it is patently untrue now, as judges along the spectrum behave like partisans, reaching the conclusions that please them based on their personal preferences, and then rationalizing them with case law. If, in defending Gorsuch from Democratic objections, Lowry is not quite attacking a straw man, he is at least attacking a wooden man. Democrats are not primarily upset about Gorsuch per se. They are upset that Antonin Scalia died during a Democrat’s term of office, but Republicans are getting the seat. If Republicans didn’t like Merrick Garland, they should have rejected him and let Obama nominate another. That is how it has always gone; that is how Democrats handled the nomination of Robert Bork, whose prospective seat is now held by Republican appointee Anthony Kennedy. Lowry expects Gorsuch to be treated on his merits as a jurist — a standard obstinately denied to Garland. The nomination of Merrick Garland was certainly a gift to Republicans: he was relatively old (63 at the time) and moderate. In his place, Democrats are expected to swallow Gorsuch, relatively young (49) and conservative. Instead of moving the court somewhat to the left and holding the seat for twenty years or so, the new justice will restore the Scalia balance and hold the seat for thirty-five years. Justices do change over time, and they don’t always vote as their nominator intended; recently David Souter, a Bush senior appointee, functioned as a liberal. But for an outright switch of polarity, we have to return to Clarence Thomas as a replacement for Thurgood Marshall. Had Al Gore taken office in 2001, as the people intended, and then been reelected in 2004, as would have been probable, then the court would have had a liberal majority once again. Instead, Bush junior got to entrench two more young, solid conservatives, one of whom (Sam Alito) is about as ideological as can be. Scalia’s death was yet another chance to create a liberal court, once again thwarted by the Electoral College, with the necessary collusion of the Republican Senate. One element of Lowry’s argument is clearly a straw man, though. There are few if any Democrats who are objecting to Gorsuch by saying something like this, as Lowry pretends: “Gorsuch is a threat to the republic because he has an overly punctilious view of the Constitution that entails, among other things, a dim view of executive overreach.” Any Democratic or liberal objections to Gorsuch per se are that he is likely to take the now-standard conservative line in Supreme Court decisions, and will, among other things, undermine or vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, in line with the Republican litmus test. And are there many Democrats whose objection to Trump is that they “fear federal power under Trump overawing the prerogatives of states and localities”, and are seeking a committed federalist? States’ rights is a reactionary cause, and Lowry knows that. Lowry does acknowledge the Garland issue, but only to dismiss it as “sheer partisanship”. And he acknowledges the abortion issue, but only in branding Democrats as obsessed with cultural issues. Fortunately, no Republicans are partisan over the Supreme Court, or obsessed with cultural issues. Lowry’s entire framing mechanism is that Neil Gorsuch should be enthusiastically welcomed by Democrats, if they truly oppose Donald Trump, because Gorsuch would be such an effective check on Donald Trump. If Lowry is so eager himself for a judge to check Trump, he should make the case for a judge who is less likely to carry water for the conservative political ideology and much more acceptable to Democrats: Merrick Garland. — O.T. Ford

Steve Bannon’s inclusion on the National Security Council has raised a number of spurious legal and moral objections. Trump and Bannon are a disaster for the United States, but none of that has to do with which specific meetings Bannon sits in on. First, the NSC has a statutory basis, 50 USC § 3021, and the staff and other resources of the NSC are somewhat constrained by that statutory basis. But the president can assemble any group of his subordinates at any time for any reason. It does not matter what he calls it. If Bannon were actually prohibited from attending NSC meetings, Trump would be completely justified in assembling the group he would rather have as the NSC, including Bannon, and calling it something else. So all the lawsuits, to say nothing of the whining, will accomplish precisely nothing. Second, the statute specifies a membership for the Council — the president, the vice president, the Secretaries of State, Defense, and Energy, and “the Secretaries and Under Secretaries of other executive departments and of the military departments, when appointed by the President by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to serve at his pleasure.” But it also makes clear that this council can have internal committees, and specifically includes on some of those committees persons who are not members of the Council at large, and cannot be. Notably, the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (the National Security Advisor) is assigned to chair two of these committees, even though he or she is not Senate-confirmed, and thus not eligible for membership on the Council. Third, the practice recently has been for the principal members of the NSC, the “Principals Committee”, to assemble as the primary configuration of the NSC, with the NSA as chair, and the White House chief of staff in attendance as well. The chief of staff is also not Senate-confirmed. By statute, then, the PC cannot be equivalent to the NSC, because it includes at least two non-members of the NSC and is chaired by one of the non-members, while the NSC can only be chaired by one of its members. The PC is not described in the statute. It can have any members the president wishes. The president can listen to any advice he receives from the PC, and then direct the executive secretary of the NSC to carry out the decisions he reaches, regardless of whether the NSC per se was giving him advice. Of course, the NSC staff is not the whole of the national-security apparatus; it is in fact just a small part. The president does not need the NSC to control the military; the Secretary of Defense does that. He does not need it to control the foreign service; the Secretary of State does that. A decision reached by the president with the advice of the PC is just as enforceable as one reached with the advice of the NSC proper. The specific attendance at these meetings is immaterial. That is the legal situation. The moral problem with Bannon on the PC is the problem with Bannon in the White House at all, but that is merely an extension of the problem with Trump in the White House. The White House would be slightly better without Bannon, but it would still be Trump’s White House. He’ll still listen to Bannon whether he sits on the PC or not; it’s not a bad thing for Bannon to be exposed to and informed by the PC deliberations beforehand, even if that also means he might influence them. Bannon’s shortcomings are well known. But objecting to him specifically is to ignore who else will be attending these meetings in the Trump White House. The NSA chairs the Principals Committee. Trump’s NSA is Michael Flynn. Flynn is a nutcase — a conspiracy theorist and a committed anti-Islam Crusader who will steer the committee in bad directions and give Trump bad advice. He’s got the Bannon line covered. And he’s the chair. A second example is Reince Priebus. The chief of staff is always included among the principals. Bannon is just as qualified to deliberate and advise on national security as Priebus or many previous chiefs of staff, which is to say, not at all, at least to begin with. The same could be said of many presidents for that matter, including Trump, of course, who is the epitome of unqualified. Bannon could easily have been chief of staff. If people are worried about a political hack without policy experience advising on national security, Priebus has got the Bannon line covered. And Priebus commands the entire White House staff, while Bannon is just a guy with an office. Those who have complained about the removal of the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from the Principals Committee have a point. But Bannon is not on the PC in the place of the DNI or the JCS chairman. Trump has made clear that he doesn’t intend to use the DNI as designed anyway, hence his removal from the PC. There are already three retired generals who participate in NSC meetings in some configuration (Flynn, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, and Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly), so the military viewpoint is well represented, and the Secretary of Defense is in charge of the military and is supposed to be aware of its status and views, so the JCS chairman is reasonably seen as superfluous. Bannon attends NSC meetings because Trump can put anyone on it he wants, essentially. He’s not taking anyone’s place. There’s not a finite number of chairs. The fact is, the PC, which is the main configuration of the NSC, will reflect the administration’s will in its composition, and it should. Trump should not be president, and Bannon should not work for the president. But Bannon’s presence at NSC meetings is not illegal, and it is hardly more immoral than what would be happening without him. — O.T. Ford

  — O.T. Ford

Tomorrow the electors of the Electoral College will elect Donald Trump president of the United States officially, and anyone who doubts this has far more faith than I do in Republican Party stalwarts to behave as citizens rather than partisans. Trump now has broad and deep support in the party, even though many of the electors may have been chosen without regard to their initial willingness to back Trump. The Electoral College is a terrible institution, as any democrat should recognize. And it is about to enact a terrible result, as any decent person should recognize. The question now is: should it? Various plans have been earnestly promoted for electors to defect from their state results and elect someone else — some other, normal, Republican — as president. I have two thoughts on the defection plan. First, it is almost certain to result in a net gain for Trump, as Hillary electors are the vast majority of those involved, and, not to give ourselves too much credit, Democrats are somewhat more likely to be responsible than Republicans, and much more likely to find Trumpism unacceptable. This net gain could be a few, or it could be more than a few. But I still resent even the one faithless elector in 2000. (If you want a replay of the self-important, deceptive showboating at play in that act, listen to the same sentiment from the committed faithless Democratic elector in Washington this year.) My concern has a historiographic element. When the history is written, I don’t want historians to have any reason to misinterpret what happened. “Electors abandoned the Democratic nominee to vote for a Republican” is likely to be read at face value, perhaps coupled with a readout of polls showing Hillary as extraordinarily unpopular, without the context of Democratic electors offering a deal to Republican electors. I mean no offense to historians; I generally think future historians will read this election better than current historians — journalists — are reading it now. But I want history to show that, even in 2016, Trump voters were a bitter, dying minority who got insanely lucky. That’s a poor second to my original hope, a Hillary blowout, a hope motivated by the same desire. I wanted current women and minorities, the rest of the world, and all future citizens to look on November’s election as a decisive rejection of Trumpism, as they had a right to expect from us. We didn’t give them that, but I still want the picture to be as clear as possible. And if only or mostly Democrats defect, they won’t have been played; they’ll have played themselves. That will only lower the image of Democrats in general, as fools. Second, I’m ambivalent about the defection plan morally, though I end up opposed on balance. As an adolescent I was the normal believer in democracy. In my twenties I developed what I called standardism, which was essentially a variant of constitutional liberalism — our society should be governed on fundamental matters by fixed, permanent, simple, and public standards, with policy debates only existing in the framework allowed by those standards. I’ll admit to a general disillusionment with democracy, which began with the election in 1988; I was convinced before the election that people had seen through Reaganism and then learned that they hadn’t. I didn’t understand policy as well then as I do now, but even in retrospect I believe I knew policy better in 1988 than that year’s electorate. Ordinary people aren’t well informed; they make bad political decisions. Even in my worst moments of despair over this fact, I never wanted to end elections, but it did crystallize my belief that certain things should never be up for a vote. I have always believed that there is such a thing as justice, that there are moral rights that exist, beyond any legal rights that are actually protected by government. This is a normal belief, nearly though not quite universal; only the content of justice and moral rights is in dispute. And the more I have studied people, the more I have been convinced that most of them don’t have a conception of justice or moral rights anything like as rational or as considered my own. I have not changed my view that moral rights exist or that I’m better able to identify them than the average person. But after a further fifteen to twenty years of comparative study of democracies and non-democracies, I have come to believe that the process, and the masses themselves, are an essential safeguard against tyranny. Democratic majorities can impose tyranny, but tyranny is more likely to come from a small group than a large group. The best defense against tyranny, often the only defense, is a majority that strongly opposes it. If we want justice in the long term, what we need to do is change minds, so that ordinary people share our view of justice. Expecting a minority to give us justice in defiance of the majority is at best a short-term strategy, perhaps even shortsighted. Of course, this is exactly what brought us our own constitutional liberalism. There is no majority in the United States today, let alone two centuries ago, in support of the actual content of the Bill of Rights (as opposed to empty support in the abstract). The Bill of Rights is a minoritarian imposition. I’m glad the framers imposed those legal rights, but that can’t be our strategy going forward. One element of my standardist view is that the standards should be written, codified. If we want different standards from the ones we have codified, we should codify those instead. The written Constitution creates a representative democracy, and the Electoral College was a part of that. It’s true that we now have statutes in the states that assign the electors to the popular-vote winners. But those laws themselves reflect an evolved political norm, and one that is only halfway to democracy. Honoring the popular vote is very different from winner-take-all by state, a semi-democratic bandage placed over what was already a maldistribution of electoral votes. Protecting this semi-democratic norm in a semi-democratic system is not a clear good in the present circumstance. In the persuasive words of @nycsouthpaw: “At each step along the way, it would’ve been less destructive of norms if Trump had been stopped sooner. That’ll continue to be the case.” I’ve never liked statements of the sort that “rules are rules, and everyone agreed to them ahead of time”. Democracy is not something we do for fun, and we don’t agree to arbitrary rules just so we can get on with the fun. No one agreed to these rules; we just haven’t been able to change them. Democracy should give us Hillary Clinton. And justice should give us Hillary Clinton, both as a matter of process and as a matter of policy. Justice is justice; this is a key standardist belief. What comfort is a process that produces an unjust outcome to those affected by it? Protecting the process is a long-term goal. We’re asking people to live with the consequences for a generation in order to protect that process. That’s a lot to ask. If they voluntarily accepted the consequences for the greater good, then I would honor them. And if I had power in a relevant situation, I would sacrifice a smaller number to save a larger number — provided I had the fortitude to adhere to principle, and provided I had confidence that the outcome would be as I expected. But how much do we know about the future? Eroded norms and the rule of law that might come of Electoral College revolt are a hypothetical danger in the future. Trump is a danger now. Trump is even a danger to norms and to the rule of law. How can we serve the rule of law by allowing Trump to be president? And let’s not forget that five supposed champions of the rule of law acted as partisans to overturn the rule of law and make George W. Bush president under similar circumstances just sixteen years ago. Gore knew he’d (and we’d) been screwed, but he respected the process. I do not think the Bush partisans, on the whole, ever did anything like that. And I see a similar asymmetry this year. Republicans as a party have shown themselves more clearly to be the party of anti-democracy as well as a host of other bad things. We act for the greater good and they act for partisan gain. Obviously that’s one reason why I take the side I do; but it’s killing us in the short term. Before 2000, I always believed that the Electoral College would be abolished instantly if the results ever split again. I was very wrong about that; it simply became another partisan issue, and the party already less devoted to democracy happened to benefit. But what if both parties had reason to hate the Electoral College? What if using the College for its express original purpose finally convinced Republican partisans that it should be done away with? But that would only happen if the College elected Hillary, not Kasich or some other Republican; and that’s not on the table. And that fact reinforces how improbable and ill-thought-out this process is. The alternative winner with the best chance, Hillary herself, is not even being considered. She is relatively close to 270 electoral votes, and is the only other person right now who has any votes at all, and of course she has the legitimacy of winning the popular vote. The idea of Democrats defecting only makes sense if the point is to give someone else an outright Electoral College victory on Tuesday. To do so, they’d need all of Hillary’s votes and 37 of Trump’s, all for the same third person. Without those 37 Republican defectors, the whole thing collapses. But with the 37 defectors, the vote goes to the House, and the House can choose that third candidate, even if none of Hillary’s electors defect. If there’s no indication that enough Republican electors will defect, there’s no point to any of Hillary’s electors defecting. And 270 is an awful lot of defections. It’s not going to happen. It’s not clear that it should, in any case. I don’t care about the arguments towards strategy, as Trump himself has unconvincingly made, that we should honor the Electoral College result from Election Day because that’s what the campaigns were basing their strategy on. But the faithless electors mentioned earlier were exercising their personal judgement; one reason that bothers me is that they are in no way supposed to do that. They were not chosen, as individuals, for their judgement. They were chosen to implement the will of their states’ voters. In the beginning, when electors were chosen as deliberative representatives and intended to use their own judgement, perhaps they were qualified to do so. Today, the electors are mostly partisan hacks. Voters on Election Day were not choosing between slates of qualified, wise electors. They were choosing between presidential candidates. The result from Election Day carries infinitely more moral authority than the personal views of the electors. Here we come to the sad, deciding truth. Whether we like it or not, the popular narrative matters. This year has further clarified how bad the narrative-construction process is. In politics, that probably comes down to the Republicans working the refs so much better, and the refs being so easily worked by the Republicans. My opinion of the press is at an all-time low. I am glad that a small cadre among them has started to take false equivalence and false balance seriously; but they’re not in charge. They’re not making the calls at CNN and the New York Times. They’re not hiring, giving assignments, editing, moderating, crafting headlines, creating layouts; and they’re not doing most of the reporting or writing, either. And since TV profits are up because of Trump coverage, and newspaper subscriptions are up because of Trump fear, those responsible for the Trump catastrophe are facing no immediate danger, unless they belong to one of Trump’s disfavored groups, and probably not even then. They’re not going to be deported. They’re not going to lose their health insurance. To listen to so many journalists being defensive and denying their role in the process is sickening. Reporters feeling sorry for themselves as some sort of beleaguered minority? Dear gods. But the damage they have done now feeds into an older, more stable narrative. The state-weighted winner-take-all result from Election Day, in that narrative, is the moral victory, and the Electoral College vote merely ratifies the moral victory as a legal victory. The undemocratic nature of the Electoral College is not deeply felt or even well understood. Voters watch on Election Day as the map is filled with red and blue, someone crosses a threshold, and the networks pronounce a winner. The time to change the system is well before Election Day, so that the media — who have proven that they cannot be trusted to convey even simple truths, let alone complex truths — are given only one possible way to report the story. The popular narrative eventually said that Bush “won” in 2000. It already says that Trump “won” this year. If someone else becomes president, the narrative will cast that as undemocratic cheating, regardless of how undemocratic a Trump presidency really is. By letting Trump take office, we are making a big gamble — that the damage he can do in four or eight years is less than the damage from a precedent and global example of the subversion of democracy, as the narrative has it. That’s the right bet, I think; but only by the slightest of margins. — O.T. Ford

I strongly believed that the 2016 election was the Democrats’ to lose; and as far as the popular vote, I was right. But I also believed that no state would swing to the Republicans that Obama had won in 2012, given his coalition’s strength, and the improved economy. In that, I was massively wrong. I have already stated that I think Trump himself was a huge factor in channeling non-college-white backlash into Republican votes. Mitt Romney could not have done this year what Trump did, because Romney is a different person with different standards; indeed, Romney personally repudiated Trumpism. But has anything changed since 2012 that could have given Trump more anger to work with? Quite a bit, actually. Among the changes are several that I would rate as major changes in the US, or the world as seen from the US. — In June of 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, which began in Iraq but was then mostly active in Syria, took over the major Iraqi city of Mosul, vaulting to global attention. This was a security threat, and a moral and emotional concern, in its own right. Additionally, refugees from the war in Syria and Iraq have created a crisis in the Middle East and Europe, and the fear of a crisis in the US. — In June of 2013, the Supreme Court overturned the federal Defense of Marriage Act in US v. Windsor, and the California prohibition against gay marriage in Hollingsworth v. Perry. The precedent of the Windsor decision led to a series of appellate rulings in the various federal circuits that legalized gay marriage for their jurisdictions, and in June of 2015, the Supreme Court, in Obergefell v. Hodges, legalized gay marriage throughout the United States. Crucially, every single state that Trump won last month had gay marriage legalized by a federal court, rather than by local action. The key Trump-Obama electorates did not choose gay marriage democratically; they had it forced upon them. — In July of 2013, George Zimmerman was acquitted of murder in the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Sanford Florida, in July of 2014, Eric Garner was killed by the New York police in a confrontation over his street-vending business, and in August of 2014, Mike Brown was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson Missouri. These events led to the Black Lives Matter movement, which saw a large segment of the black community, and their supporters, square off against the police (mostly non-college whites), and their supporters — in other words, key constituencies of the Democratic and Republican bases, in conflict over policy with life-or-death implications. Several other events happened that also changed the political stakes of the election: — In February of 2016, the Trans-Pacific Partnership was signed and submitted for ratification. Clinton as well as Trump had rejected the TPP during the campaign. In Clinton’s case, it was most likely done to keep organized labor from defecting to a primary opponent; her prior support for the deal as Secretary of State made her rejection more suspect than Trump’s, as Trump ran against free trade in general, and was a more-vociferous opponent. — In February of 2016, Antonin Scalia died, raising the possibility that Barack Obama could appoint a liberal justice who would swing the balance of the Supreme Court. To the extent that the Supreme Court occupies the attention of voters, it is through past decisions that offend their values. In the case of Trump voters, those would be on gay marriage, Obamacare, and abortion, primarily. (Ordinary voters, including Trump voters, generally don’t oppose the real Obamacare; rather, they oppose the idea of Obamacare that they have been fed by a faction of conservatives.) — In February of 2015, Obama vetoed a bill forcing approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, and in November of 2015, the administration ended the approval process with a denial. This was a highly-visible fight in the environment-versus-fossil-fuel war; it did not directly involve coal, but was taken as evidence that the Democrats were choosing nature over fossil-fuel jobs. — In April of 2014, Cliven Bundy, who used federal land to graze his cattle but had not paid over $1 million in fees, was first subjected to a federal enforcement of rulings against him, and resisted, eventually drawing other resisters. At the beginning of 2016, two of his sons and other supporters occupied a part of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge to protest federal land policies and ownership; the occupation led to the death of one protester offsite, and the eventual arrest of the remaining protesters. Shortly before the election, seven defendants, including the Bundys, were found not guilty. — In November of 2014, the Obama administration proposed a significant expansion of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). This has yet to be implemented, but did serve to raise the immigration issue again, for those who care about it. And finally, a few things transformed the environment in which the election was contested: — In September of 2013, Jim Comey became director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Had Obama chosen to nominate a Democrat, or a Republican either with more integrity or who could wield greater authority over his agents (choose your theory), Clinton would have been subjected to neither the self-important sermonizing press conference in July, nor the devastating letter of insinuation eleven days before the election. Both events hurt Clinton measurably in the polls; the second was decisive, because there was not sufficient time for her approval to recover. — Mitt Romney was as hawkish on security matters as Barack Obama, or more so, meaning that foreign adversaries, specifically the Russian government and its ally Julian Assange, had no particular preference for one candidate. The substitution of Trump for Romney in 2016 changed that perception radically. Trump was clearly preferable to Clinton from a Russian/WikiLeaks perspective, and Trump benefitted from an orchestrated effort by Russia and WikiLeaks to destroy Clinton. — Social media, while very much a factor in 2012, had advanced by four years, in its reach, and in the sophistication by which certain actors exploited it. Some of those actors were normal parts of the campaign landscape; others were subversive, such as Russian intelligence and WikiLeaks. Many of the new users, on the other hand, particularly on Facebook, were not sophisticated consumers of the information that circulated on social media. — In June of 2013, the Supreme Court, in Shelby County v. Holder, invalidated a central feature of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. This ruling allowed states with a history of discrimination to change the rules under which they conduct elections without approval of the federal government, and most did so. Obviously this is a preliminary and partial list, but by itself these would explain much of the change. — O.T. Ford

  — O.T. Ford

Analyzing the shocking outcome of the 2016 election in a rigorous way will not be possible for some time, as the final vote counts are still not yet known, and exit polls are unreliable and, with fewer being done, increasingly so. We shouldn’t ask why Donald Trump won in a simplistic way, since in the broadest sense he lost: he lost the popular vote, probably by more than a million votes. But of course, the real stakes are in the fifty-six local elections (fifty states, the District of Columbia, and the five Congressional districts in Nebraska and Maine). Those elections did not turn out as predicted, owing to a systematic polling error. The only reasonable explanation for this is that eventual Trump voters were telling pollsters they were undecided, or voting for Gary Johnson. Given the numbers, these were almost certainly people who always intended to vote for Trump and didn’t want to admit it, whether to a pollster or to themselves. To explain why they wanted Trump in the first place, we can ask either why Trump did better with respect to (say) Mitt Romney, or why he did better in selective local elections. Since we can’t know, here are my informed guesses, in order: 1. Donald Trump excited white men, and white people more broadly. He did this largely through a cultural and identity appeal, to which certain economic beliefs (or misbeliefs) contributed in smaller ways. Trump’s appeal as a brash celebrity who had lots of sex with beautiful women, and who (it was falsely believed) was both an enormous business success and the rare politician who tells the truth, made him an excellent figurehead for the sort of aspirational, reactionary authoritarianism he was selling. This was a major factor in swinging some degree of Obama voters and consolidating Republicans, and probably driving turnout, despite Trump’s lack of a traditional ads-and-organization campaign. It may seem frustrating that Hillary was so often viewed as less honest than Trump, of all people, but ‘honest’ clearly means something else to Trump fans. They love that he is selectively candid, that he says outrageous things that other politicians won’t. The rest of us believe those outrageous things to be false, but Trump voters think they are true. Hence, he alone is “honest”. The idea that Hillary Clinton lost white voters, relative to Obama, because she didn’t try to reach them is, I think, false; it can only be that she didn’t pander to them in a particular way (immigrants are the problem; coal is the solution), which would have made her not Hillary and not a Democrat. The difference between Trump and Romney is far more important to the story than that between Clinton and Obama. A certain proportion of the white working class was willing to support Obama over Romney and then switched to Trump. That doesn’t mean anyone else could have beaten Clinton; it means no one else could have beaten Trump. 2. A lot of men hate women, and a lot of voters hate Hillary Clinton. Seemingly-personal hatred of Hillary Clinton itself traces back almost entirely to her gender, and the fact that she did not conform to gender stereotypes when she became known to voters in Arkansas and the US a generation ago. She was caricatured as dishonest and corrupt largely because of this, and not anything she did. The image was reinforced by Bernie Sanders, relying (though unwittingly, I think) on the preexisting image manufactured by the right, bolstered by his own arguments about Wall Street et cetera. Trump successfully tapped into both the rightist and leftist caricatures. The media (network and cable television news and the mainstream print outlets, above all the New York Times), with timely assists from Russia, WikiLeaks, and Jim Comey and the FBI, made this the only story anyone heard about Hillary Clinton; for a group of supposed liberals, reporters and editors clearly have a collective contempt for Hillary. Trump, by contrast, was largely presented in his own words through massive uncritical television coverage; neither TV nor print journalism could be bothered to create so much as an equivalent narrative about Trump, let alone an appropriately-worse narrative, despite the fact that most reporters and editors (I hope) recognized him as in fact significantly worse than Hillary across the board. Hillary’s negative image helped consolidate Republicans behind Trump and increase the third-party vote relative to 2012. Hillary lost several of the local contests by narrow margins, so we do not need much of an explanation for the loss. There are lots of small factors that could have contributed in small ways, some possibly decisively in close contests, but none as important as the above, considering that each affected the election in large ways. Of the lesser explanations, I would give most emphasis to one of them: 3. Republicans engaged in very effective voter suppression efforts, again with a timely assist by the Roberts court. State Republicans knowingly targeted blacks, Hispanics, and poor people as likely Democratic voters, and they did it to some extent in plain view. Post hoc critiques of Hillary’s campaign tactics are especially beside the point — roughly analogous to the 20/20 hindsight that Al Gore could have won in 2000 merely by explaining the butterfly ballot to a few hundred old people in West Palm Beach. True; but any campaign has finite time and resources, and spends them as strategically as possible, using all the information they have at the time. The fact that public polling and the internal polling of both campaigns apparently misrepresented voter intention with respect to Trump is not the Clinton campaign’s fault. In retrospect, we could have assigned many undecided and third-party poll respondents to Trump, but even the Trump campaign didn’t do that. Notably, my two main suggested explanations are personal. It can’t be emphasized enough that Hillary Clinton was exceptionally qualified, Donald Trump exceptionally unqualified, and the people as a whole chose Hillary. But for the people who switched sides, personalities mattered. If this is correct, then the polarization of the US electorate, the rigidity of partisan identity, is not quite as complete as we had been told, and as I had come to believe. But there is an alternative with disturbing implications: this result may represent a new equilibrium of partisan polarization. In other words, the further move of the white working class to the Republicans, and the further move of Hispanics, Asians, and college-educated whites (particularly women) to the Democrats, is permanent. Those Obama-Trump voters will never vote for the Democrats again. The Republican Party is the conservative party, and much of its base is actually reactionary, wishing not merely to oppose change but to undo change that has already taken place. The Conservative Movement, obsessed with lower taxes, is an ideology of and for the elite. Base conservatives are more conservative on social, cultural, and identity matters. Evangelical Christians were already largely in the Republican camp. But other groups of former privilege — men, whites, other Christians, straights — are continuing to respond to their loss of privilege, and the jarring social changes like gay marriage and women politicians, by choosing Trump over Clinton or even by permanently consolidating into the Republican party. I oppose identity politics as practiced by the far left, especially in the campus form most familiar to me. But many of my fellow opponents have offered disillusioning claims about identity politics being to blame for Trump’s rise, even conflating the white working class with the poor and suggesting that Democrats don’t care about the poor, even though Democratic policies help the poor (and help them not to be poor), and Republican policies do the opposite. Poor blacks and Hispanics voted for Hillary overwhelmingly, and the white working class is not poor. They just can’t stand that women, blacks, Hispanics, gays, immigrants, and non-Christians have to share in social power at the expense of their former privilege. Trump lies all the time, and the press has largely let him. He was never punished by voters either because they don’t care, or because they don’t know the truth. Trump gave his base red meat (“bomb the shit out of them”) in a way that Hillary would not duplicate. Trump’s brazen dishonesty and bombastic pseudo-policies are irresponsible. Hillary couldn’t compete with that except by being irresponsible herself. Hillary campaigned as a woman who intended to govern. Trump campaigned as a man who only cared about the next adoring rally. Flash over substance. Irresponsible, unprepared man over responsible, well-prepared woman. If this is what the white working class is after, then I think we all understand them perfectly well already, and: no. — O.T. Ford