A sober assessment

Ezra Klein discovers that Donald Trump is an aspiring autocrat, and he’s not becoming something else just because he lost an election (I generally like Klein’s work, but his attitude toward “American exceptionalism” here seems jejune, i.e., maybe the concept is exaggerated or possibly even false. Ya think?):

That this coup probably will not work — that it is being carried out farcically, erratically, ineffectively — does not mean it is not happening, or that it will not have consequences. Millions will believe Trump, will see the election as stolen. The Trump family’s Twitter feeds, and those of associated outlets and allies, are filled with allegations of fraud, and lies about the process (reporter Isaac Saul has been doing yeoman’s work tracking these arguments, and his thread is worth reading). It’s the construction of a confusing, but immersive, alternative reality in which the election has been stolen from Trump, and weak-kneed Republicans are letting the thieves escape.

This is, to borrow Hungarian sociologist Bálint Magyar’s framework, “an autocratic attempt.” That’s the stage in the transition toward autocracy in which the would-be autocrat is trying to sever his power from electoral check. If he’s successful, autocratic breakthrough follows, and then autocratic consolidation occurs. In this case, the would-be autocrat stands little chance of being successful. But he will not entirely fail, either. What Trump is trying to form is something akin to an autocracy-in-exile, an alternative America in which he is the rightful leader, and he — and the public he claims to represent — has been robbed of power by corrupt elites.

“Democracy works only when losers recognize that they have lost,” writes political scientist Henry Farrell. That will not happen here.

And make no mistake: The entire Republican party, with a semi-diffident exception in the form of Mitt Romney, is going along with Trump’s farcical claims of election fraud.

More sobering yet is the fact that the American political system, after this week, is going to be even more bizarrely asymmetrical:

Even if Trump is rejected in this election, the Republican Party that protected and enabled him will not be. Their geographic advantage in the Senate insulates them from anything but massive, consecutive landslide defeats, and their dominance over the decennial redistricting process has given them a handicap in the House, too.

That divergence almost saved Trump: though the presidential election will not be close in terms of the popular vote, the margins in the key Electoral College states were narrow, and the would-be autocrat was almost returned to office. How much more damage could he have done to American institutions and elections with another four years? It could have happened here, and it truly almost did.

Here’s the grim kicker: The conditions that made Trump and this Republican Party possible are set to worsen. Republicans retained control of enough statehouses to drive the next redistricting effort, too, and their 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court will unleash their map-drawers more fully. The elections analyst G. Elliott Morris estimates that the gap between the popular vote margin and the tipping point-state in the Electoral College will be 4-5 percentage points, and that the GOP’s control of the redistricting process could push it to 6-7 points next time.

Within a very few years — indeed by 2024 — it’s going to be quite possible for a Republican presidential candidate to lose the election by ten or twelve million votes and still win the Electoral College. Within 20 years, states that represent 30% of the US population are going to control 70% of the Senate.

None of this is democracy in even a loose sense. This is white supremacy encoded as our fundamental constitutional law. (Claims that this election indicated that Republicans are making inroads among non-white voters are wildly exaggerated. Black voters still rejected them by something approaching ten to one margins, and the 30ish percent of “Latino” voters who voted for Trump shrinks drastically when you remove “Latinos” who very much consider themselves white, and will certainly be coded as white by pragmatic Republicans who realize that inventing more white people is critical to the GOP’s survival, even with the massive advantage provided to it by a Constitution that, under current conditions, is basically a roadmap to herrenvolk democracy).

The glass half full is that Joe Biden is going to end up with about 11 million more votes than any presidential candidate in history prior to this week. The glass half empty is that Donald Trump is going to end up with about four million more.

I’ll admit to falling victim to massive optimism bias: While I didn’t really think anything like a Hoover/Goldwater/McGovern style blowout is possible any more under contemporary American political conditions (this election was among other things a social science experiment in how many votes can a Republican presidential candidate get when the candidate is literally the worst person in the world), I did think it was possible that Biden would win the popular vote by something like 55 to 43 percent — that, after all, was a result that was well within the boundaries of most of the last national polls.

It’s going to end up more like 51 to 47 percent after all the votes are counted. 47 percent of the country that bothered to vote voted for Donald Trump. If Trump had demonstrated even the most minimal competence in handling the pandemic, he probably would have been re-elected.

Of course the difficulty with this counterfactual is that if he had done that he wouldn’t be Donald Trump: a huge portion of that 47 percent is literally voting for him because of his most loathsome qualities, so people who wonder what would happen if you had a GOP candidate who was a less stupid fascist have to deal with the difficulty that fascism is and indeed celebrates stupidity by definition. A less demagogic and more competent version of Trump is to a considerable extent a contradiction in terms, or at least we better hope so.

The path forward can be captured by one word: Georgia. That is the hope — that the demographics of urbanization can overcome both the massive structural advantage that Republicans have, and that can’t be changed short of a new constitutional order, and the fact that 47 percent of this country, more or less, is actually just fine with authoritarian ethno-nationalism, when it was presented to them in the most undisguised form possible.

In the meantime, it’s worth noting that anyone who signs a lease in Georgia 30 days before an election is eligible to vote there, and that a lease can be for one dollar (More thoughts on this tomorrow).