It is the fascism folks have been warning about. This isn’t about enforcing laws. This is about whatever Trump decides is cheating. Or who Trump decides is engaging in unscrupulous behavior. That’s anyone who has stood between Trump and something he wants.
When Vance finally said that he didn’t thing Trump had lost the 2020 election, he didn’t mention voter fraud or law breaking election workers — he talked about how the Hunter Biden laptop story was handled.
He knows there was no voter or election fraud. So, he’s extended the universe of valid reasons to reject the results of an election to just about any grievance against anyone that could be imagined — including how the press covers an election, the content of political ads (DeSantis already threatened to criminally prosecute a tv station for running a political ad in which a woman describes her horrible experience caused by Florida’s anti-abortion statute.)
The other night, I read up on something called the Social Normalization of Deviance. It’s a terrible name. “Deviance” just means deviation from norms, standards or rules designed to prevent catastrophe.
This term became popularized during the Challenger investigation. The engineers knew that it was dangerous to launch when it was too cold. But, every time there was launch in cold conditions and nothing bad happened, the conclusion was that the risk of launching in cold conditions was smaller than they thought it was. And so they pushed the margins, each time concluding that the risk was smaller.
Until BOOM!
Here is the flaw in the engineer’s thinking. Suppose you just happen to have a bottle with 1000 identical pills, 999 of which are super pain relievers and one is deadly poison. You know that using those pills would be a very bad idea. But one day you have one of those ice pick stabbing into your eyes kinds of headaches and you only have that bottle of pills and to make the pain go away, you’ll risk it. So, you take a pill.
And nothing happens.
The next time, you don’t have to think so hard before taking the pill. And with each successful use, your estimation of the risk becomes lower and lower. Maybe you even convince yourself that you were wrong about that poison pill being there at all.
Until the day you take the pill and you die.
The mistake was in interpreting a successful use of the pill as a reduction of risk. It wasn’t. You just got lucky that time.
And when you have a group of people involved in the risk assessment, it becomes very easy for it’s members to persuade each other that the danger isn’t really that bad.
Travel back in time to 2008. Suppose I had told you this hypothetical. A Presidential candidate had told his many supporters throughout the election that other side was going cheat and that the only way he could lose was if the other side cheated. When he lost, he immediately claimed widespread voter fraud. He brings and loses dozens and dozens of lawsuits challenging the results. He false accuses specific election workers of fraud. He calls and lobbies governors and state legislators to overturn the results. When his own attorney general tells him there is no evidence of fraud, he tells the AG to tell the public there is evidence of fraud and leave the rest to him. After the states designate their electors, he approves a scheme to have his electors fraudulently certify themselves as their states electors with the goal of having the election decided by House, by one vote per state. He pressures the vice president publicly and privately to use the fraudulent slates of electors as an excuse to violate his constitutional duty to count the votes. When the Vice President doesn’t agree to go along with the scene, he gives an incendiary speech on the day of the count and then tells the crowd to march on the Capitol where the legislators and his VP are getting ready for the count, knowing that there are armed persons in the crowd. When a large portion of the crowd violently assaults police officers and tries to physically force its way into the chambers where the count was to take place, he sits and watches the riot for several hours before taking any action to end it.
If, after giving you that hypothetical, I asked you whether it would be a good idea to elect that guy as president in a future election, you’d have thought I was crazy to even ask the question. No one in their right mind would have thought that anyone who went to those lengths to steal an election, overturning the will of the voters, should be let near any elected office, let alone the presidency.
So, when you see or hear someone say “what are you so scared of, power was transferred peacefully last time,” you’re hearing someone who has fooled themselves about the enormous risks of putting an election thief back into office, and they want to spread their deviance from the norms and standards vital to protect our democracy to you.
Trump’s failure to steal the election doesn’t mean he’s not a danger to democracy — we just got lucky. Like, one VP away from disaster lucky.
The damage that Trump has done to our country is severe and may take a long time to mend. Election workers and volunteers in the US work their asses off to make our elections fair and free. And although many belong to a political party, they are Americans first, They do their jobs because they believe in our system of government.
Donald Trump, who his supporters unironically call a “uniter,” has set his mob of thugs loose on election workers, who for the first time in their employment or volunteer careers have been hit with a barrage of disgusting threats, including death. The Atlantic has an article on the death threats, the threats against children and family members. Millions of dollars in security measures have been spent to protect both the safety of the workers and the security of ballots. Many long time election workers have been bullied into quitting. Never once has Trump lifted a finger to discourage his supports from this kind of inexcusable behavior. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/ ... mp/680362/
Trump's behavior has never been normal. He’s much, much worse now. He’s smashed through the guardrails that exist so that we don’t wake up in a dictatorship. And each time he does it, politicians and the media kid themselves that maybe we didn’t need that guardrail after all. Like the space shuttle engineers, our luck won’t last forever.
If you don’t take Trump seriously, here’s somebody who does: Jeff Bezos. After Trump’s election, it changed its motto to Democracy Dies in Darkness. It endorsed Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020. As the editorial staff was finalizing its endorsement for Harris, word came down from Bezos that there would be no endorsement. Trump threatened Bezo’s businesses in his first term, and he can see his space competitor snuggling up to Trump. So, he’s appeasing Trump in case he wins. When the captains of industry start lining up behind or acquiescing to the autocrat, that’s fascism.
One of the things I read once about democracies that get captured by authoritarians: institutions will not save you.
Only you can save you, and that’s at the polls.
