In the 50s the head of CIA counterintelligence James Angleton said Russian stratagems were like “a wilderness of mirrors”. The same phrase captures the maze of the US constitutional and electoral system, a wilderness of mirrors that can warp, even falsify, the choice of voters on November 3.
This system was not intended as a democracy but as republic. This is an essential starting point for grasping the US crisis.
“A republic, if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin said in 1787 when constituents asked what the founding fathers at Philadelphia had agreed on. One designed, he could have added, to use a creation called the electoral college to thwart popular rule.
As a result, even if Biden leads Trump by 4 million votes, according to statistician Nate Silver, the electoral college could still be a toss-up. It’s a device not found in any other elective presidency.
Meanwhile, Trump’s party practises voter suppression to discourage voting by minorities. Republican states make it hard for minorities and the young to register. They limit voting machines at booths in poor or black districts to force long queues and waits of hours.
Says Barack Obama, “We really are the only advanced democracy on Earth that systematically and purposely makes it really hard for people to vote.”
Simply inconceivable in any other Western country, this systemic voter suppression rebuts any lingering notion of the US as a democracy, as opposed to a republic with constitutionally entrenched freedom of expression.
The same constitution that indulges such abuses also produced a Supreme Court with the political reach of a third chamber, sitting above Senate and House. Filling the Ginsberg vacancy with Amy Coney Barrett is another chapter in a 50-year project by conservatives to build conservative courts as an anti-majoritarian backstop. It is promising Republicans a majority on the bench, locked in for decades.
Except, with morbid humour beyond reach of any satirist’s pen, the September 26 Rose Garden launch of Barrett’s nomination morphed into a superspreading massacre. As the party elite panted their enthusiasm for the nomination, their excited cross breaths carried a viral load that took down the chair of the Republican National Committee, the campaign manager and, at last count, three senators.
On the face of it, this extinguishes the Senate majority required for the Barrett nomination. Russian agents at the tea urn could not have been more lethal.
With or without Barrett, the Supreme Court will be dragged in to settle a contested result but not perhaps if it gets first flung to Congress. And not just because of a tied electoral college, a possibility recently canvassed. Another way Congress picks the president has been outlined by Lawrence Douglas, a professor from Amherst College and author of the 2020 book Will He Go?.
His scenario is that at midnight Biden has a lead in the electoral college vote of, say, 250 to 240 but in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania faces a painfully slow count of mail-in votes. Republicans insist tens of thousands be tossed out because of their date or misplaced initials. In the end, the legislatures in the three states (all Republican) submit to Congress the names of the electors pledged to Trump. But the governors (all Democrats) submit the names of those pledged to Biden.
Congress has to pick. The election devolves into a battle between the Democratic House and Republican Senate (unless the Democrats win four seats). This would, according to some lawyers, pre-empt further consideration of the election by the Supreme Court.
Meanwhile on the streets?
Trump’s repeated failure to endorse a peaceful transfer of power turns an exuberant conman into Munich putschist. Not even Viktor Orban in Hungary or France’s National Rally has nodded to purveyors of street violence.
If Biden wins the popular vote but has the election awarded to Trump by Electoral College or Congress there will likely be protests. Trump will respond by ordering into the streets his shaggy militia of off-duty cops, former military and bikies eager to brandish gun collections, with ammunition stocked up in recent months for this very showdown. “Stand down and stand by.”
Do the Joint Chiefs take orders from an embattled White House to use troops to put down one set of protesters? The relationship between the commander-in-chief and his army is another feature of the system that may be tested in this strangest of elections.
Better for the country is a clear-cut Biden victory. An uncontested outcome, as sweet as a Norman Rockwell cover on The Saturday Evening Post.
It would leave the Trump forces smouldering. There would be a contest to take leadership of this movement, the populist white nationalist impulse launched with Trump’s 2016 takeover of the Republican Party. It may be between Ivanka and Don jnr, a succession drama in a mob family. Or go to an outsider such as Fox frontman Tucker Carlson, with 4 million viewers.
The winner would storm through the 2024 primaries wearing the sanctified red cap and promising to take the country back, the voters horrified by Biden’s successor: black, and a woman to boot. That would mobilise the base.
Bob Carr is a former Premier of New South Wales (1995–2005), a former Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs (2012–2013) and the former Director of the Australia–China Relations Institute, the University of Technology Sydney (2014–2019).
Bob Carr was the longest-serving premier of NSW and a federal Labor foreign minister.
Comments
5 responses to “There’s an essential starting point for grasping the crisis engulfing US politics”
I’m not sure the talent pool isn’t a little wider albeit no deeper than Mr Carr suggests. What about Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas who I think the NYT said was Trump without the Twitter? I can’t see either of the Don’s dullard kids doing it, particularly if Trump has a big loss.
Many thanks to Bob Carr for giving us another lesson on American politics. The world most advertised democracy can still have an elected minority President is indeed unusual. Sadly, the divisions within America is not about real issues of national interesst but on issues of division created out of vote catching, particularly the racial politics. With the widening of the gap between the rich and poor, how many people infected with covid-19 died because of inadequate sanitary measures comes from a disadvantaged social economic background? The invention of China as the new enemy enjoys bi-partisan support of the Republicans and Democrats and that is another extremism of American politics of vote catching.
Today @ Moon of Alabama was a portion of an interview between a journalist and President Assad of Syria, which provides an amazing insight into how who becomes the US President is largely irrelevant:
Question 9: You definitely follow the presidential campaign in the United States. And do you hope that the new US President, regardless of the name of the winner, will review sanctions policies towards Syria?
President Assad: We don’t usually expect presidents in the American elections, we only expect CEOs; because you have a board, this board is made of the lobbies and the big corporates like banks and armaments and oil, etc. So, what you have is a CEO, and this CEO doesn’t have the right or the authority to review; he has to implement. And that’s what happened to Trump when he became president after the elections –
Journalist: He used to be CEO for many years before.
President Assad: Exactly! And he is a CEO anyway. He wanted to follow or pursue his own policy, and he was about to pay the price – you remember the impeachment issue. He had to swallow every word he said before the elections. So, that’s why I said you don’t expect a president, you only expect a CEO. If you want to talk about changing the policy, you have one board – the same board will not change its policy. The CEO will change but the board is still the same, so don’t expect anything.
Question 10: Who are this board? Who are these people?
President Assad: As I said, this board is made up of the lobbies, so they implement whatever they want, and they control the Congress and the others, and the media, etc. So, there’s an alliance between those different self-vested interest corporations in the US.
True enough. It is a ramshackle system but the more important problem is Wall Street’s dominance over both major parties and the question is — can either party get closer to Main Street without the emergence of a third political party or the strengthening of the Greens? The biggest problem of all is the stuff the kids have been taught in University economics departments during the monetarist ascendancy of the last 40 years.
A clear-cut Biden victory? A possibility. And Donald? Your fall will be as spectacular as your rise, if briefer. You will be remembered. You will be forgotten. I hope your wife and children are ready. I know, or at least I think I know, that you are not.
But back to that clear-cut Biden victory. How long before that veil drops, and President Harris steps forth? Defunded police will be empowered, and order will return as the streets quieten into a simmering disquiet.
A time of Kali beckons.