I’m concerned, writing first thing in the morning used to be so easy for me. Now early afternoon feels like an accomplishment. I used to be able to write fine without coffee. I’ll blame COVID-19. It’s not COVID-19’s fault but I know it won’t sue me. The vaccine will give me immunity.
I made an expedition to Aldi yesterday. I’m not going to complain about the annoying people I encountered. I will complain that I forgot to bring reading glasses. I was the guy looking at his phone at arm’s length. There was a challenge reading some of the prices and weights. I bought pork loin again and needed to compare the prices between the single and two packs. The singles were only 10¢/lbs more and were seasoned so I went with that. I’d have had to freeze one of the loins if I bought the double. This is about the only thing I cook where there are leftovers. One loin weighs about a pound so I’ll cook it and turn it into three meals. That means I don’t have to decide what to eat for half this week.
My shopping was heavy on the pork. For the first time in three visits they had the Appleton Farms Gourmet Thick Sliced Bacon. It is so much better than their other bacon. It’s better than any of the name brands. The only thing that compares is the bacon I eat at Falcon Ridge and Thanksgiving supplied by the Van Mercs. That’s from a local farm where the pigs are not kept in stalls where they can’t move but in spas with a swimming pool, sauna, gym, and on-call masseuse. At least that’s how I imagine it.
It looks like people are getting better about wearing masks. It might be because COVID-19 is getting worse and it might be because they keep you warm when it’s cold. It’s probably a combination of the two. I didn’t encounter a single maskless individual in the store. That’s great for the Bronx. We do better than Staten Island but worse than the rest of the City. I just checked, as the infection rate rises elsewhere it’s down in my zip code. It’s still the too high 3.59% but last time I checked it was 4.13%. If you live in New York you can check your neighborhood here, COVID-19 Data. Looking at the graphs on the page I see the City has turned the corner. See it isn’t always bad news. The important thing is to not ease up on being careful.
There is a perspective on the election that is striking but I haven’t seen mentioned by others. President Biden will be the fifth president in a row seen as illegitimate by much of the opposition. It started with Bill Clinton; he was the most popular president of the last 30 years, but the right was hellbent on delegitimizing him which led to him being impeached on ridiculous charges. When the Whitewater investigation came up with nothing on Whitewater they just kept looking for things to nail him on. Finally, they set up a perjury trap by investigating his personal life. The country as a whole rejected the attempt and his approval didn’t take a hit. But that set the stage for what followed.
In 2000 George W. Bush had two strikes against him, first he clearly lost the popular vote. His election did not follow the will of the people, but it did of the law. But the second strike is that it isn’t clear that he won the electoral college. The reality is that the Florida vote was too close to know who got the most vote. He came down to interpreting hanging chads. Then to make it worse the Supreme Court weighed in where it had never weighed in before. In later cases the court refused to get involved in political disputes and would not invalidate heavy gerrymandering, saying that the voting rules belong to the states. But here they said exactly the opposite. This was not a constitutional crisis because Gore put the good of the country ahead of his own interest and didn’t fight it. In 1960 Nixon, hardly a model of moral rectitude did the same with the disputed Illinois voting.
Bush clearly won in 2004 but some Democrats, though not the leadership, disputed his election. The argument was someone similar to some of the arguments that Trump is making. People went to sleep thinking Gore won and woke up to find that the final tabulations showed otherwise. The problem then was not just that it was super close, but that people misused exit polling to claim it showed that Gore won. Exit polls are not designed to do that. They are not scientific polls. The demographics are just guessed. The firms that do the polling make it clear that their purpose is to give insight into how different groups voted, not call the election. I was perturbed that people that should have known better were making these arguments. Fortunately for the country congress and the state governments never bought into that and treated Bush’s election as legitimate, which it was. His re-election was quite different than his initial election. He was the only Republican to win the popular vote since 1988.
The Republicans couldn’t argue over Obama’s election, he clearly won both times. So, they made the totally nefarious claim that he was legally qualified to be president because he was not born in the US. This failed on two points. First, he was born in Hawaii, which is in the US. Secondly even if he hadn’t been his mother was a US citizen that makes him one without the need for naturalization. He would still be a “natural born citizen. That didn’t stop much of the GOP, led by Donald Trump, from shouting the claim to the rafters. He was a black man with a foreign sounding name and that was enough to convince people that he should not be allowed to be president. This was the most toxic challenge of legitimacy yet.
Then came Trump who like Bush II had a double whammy. First like Bush he lost the popular vote. He lost by far more than Bush lost. Then we found out that Russia interfered with the election. They didn’t change the votes, Trump was the legal winner, but it left a taint, which was made worse by Trump denying the Russian intervention. Still Democrats accepted his election. There were a few who encouraged electors to go against the vote in their states but I’m sure they now see how wrong that is. Imagine how they’d howl if the Pennsylvania electors voted for Trump because they accepted his accusation of electoral fraud? You can’t have it both ways. Electors can vote their conscience, or they can’t. The rule can’t be that they can vote your conscience.
Now comes President-elect Biden. He clearly won both the popular vote and electoral college. There is no legitimate cause for dispute, just as there wasn’t for Obama, but that didn’t stop Trump from challenging Obama’s legitimacy and it’s not stopping him from claiming, against all the evidence, that he won this time. The worst part is that half of the people who voted for Trump agree with this. This is not a small minority. This is about a quarter of the people that voted. Can you have a democracy where a quarter of the people think they aren’t living in a democracy? I don’t think there will be a civil war. They won’t have the stomach for that, but they will fight Biden tooth and nail. Biden will inherit a country that’s exceedingly difficult to govern.
What of the future? Will this be the new norm? Will Republicans fight every election they lose? Will they continue to destroy faith in democracy? Will Democrats then deny Republicans when they win elections? He has enough on his plate already but rebuilding trust in democracy has to be a priority for Biden. Perhaps with Trump out of power Republicans will peer over the edge of oblivion and step back. Places recover from civil wars with civilian massacres. It isn’t easy and takes a long time, but it happens. We have to always keep in mind that has to be the goal. A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half not accepting elections and half believing in democracy.
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Wise Madness 