I Don't Care About the Issues
With the election coming up, I suspect that almost everyone has already made up their mind and will not change. But in case there are a few people who are uncertain, or in case you just want to know how I think about it, let’s have one post before Nov. 5.
1. The Issues
Some of the issues that I hear are important to people:
Abortion
Border security
Inflation
Crime
Ukraine war
I hear that maybe Trump (/Harris) is better on some of these issues. But I don’t care about any of that.* Even if Trump was better than Harris on all of those issues, I don’t think that matters. I think that what matters is the broader conduct by one of the candidates threatening central norms of American democracy.
[ *Of course I care in the sense that I prefer better policies over worse. But I don’t think one should decide how to vote in this election on that basis. ]
2. What Conduct?
There has been such a firehose of coverage of various (alleged) flaws of Trump that the most important stuff may have been lost.
a. Conduct I don’t care about
Let’s start with the BS that I don’t care about.
I don’t care that he had sex with a porn star, made a hush money payment, and incorrectly described the payment in his business records.
Don’t care that he has 34 felony convictions, since they were all about item (1).
Don’t care that he said “there were very fine people on both sides” in Charlottesville. (Joe Biden & the media repeatedly glossed this as “Trump called white supremacists very fine people”. But he literally, explicitly said at the time that he was not talking about the white supremacists.)
Don’t care about coarse language like “shithole countries”.
Don’t care about anything that he tweeted.
Don’t care that he’s rude to other candidates or makes up childish nicknames for them.
Don’t care about classified documents.
Barely care that he comes up with foolish ideas like fighting Covid with disinfectant in the body.
I barely even care that he thinks the U.S. has invisible airplanes or that the colonists took over airports during the American Revolution.
In a normal election, I would care about those sorts of things. But all of them are trivial in comparison with the rest of what is at stake.
b. Conduct I care about
There’s really only one thing that I care about. The U.S. President, for the first time in the history of the country, made a concerted and credible, illegal attempt to not leave office after he was voted out.
When the votes were being counted, he made a serious, credible effort to get public officials in swing states to falsify the vote. He told the Georgia Secretary of State to “find” another 11,000 votes so he could win. He tried to get the legislatures in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Michigan (states that he had lost) to reject the legitimate electors.
He tried to get police in Michigan to seize voting machines and turn them over to the Trump campaign.
He organized slates of fake electors in seven states that he had lost. He had them forge documents saying that he had won the electoral votes from those states.
He then tried to get Mike Pence to count the fake votes on January 6—or, failing that, to declare that it was impossible to determine which were the real election certificates, and thus the votes from those states couldn’t be counted.
His plan after that point was that, since neither candidate would have a majority of electoral votes, the election would be thrown into the House of Representatives, where Republicans would have had control, and they would have declared Trump the winner.
When Mike Pence refused to cooperate, Trump tried to intimidate Pence and disrupt the vote count by inciting a mob to break into the Capitol building.
This is not a small matter. This is the first time any U.S. President has done anything remotely like this. These were not just a few offhand remarks, or passing whims. This was a months-long, conscious plan to defy the election results. If this sort of thing were allowed, that would end democracy. That’s not an exaggeration. The one thing you need in order to have democracy is that people follow election results.
3. So What?
No Republican seems to care about this. So let me explain the problem.
a. The priority: preserving the system
The first thing that every American should know about their society is that it is vastly better than the overwhelming majority of societies that have existed in human history or that exist today. Nearly everyone throughout human history lived in conditions of horrifyingly severe poverty, oppression, and misery.
Any normal policy issue that we debate within our political system is trivial by comparison. The difference between (the U.S. with good policies) and (the U.S. with poor policies) is negligible in comparison with the difference between (the U.S.) and (a typical society in human history).
Whatever the U.S. has that makes it so well off, if we disrupt that thing, the most likely result is a regression to the mean—i.e., that our society would move toward the normal state for human societies, which is one of abject misery.
Therefore, we should not accept a serious risk of disrupting our system for the sake of getting a few moderately better policies.
b. What does America have?
What differentiates us from Third World countries today, or normal societies in history?
We have relatively well-functioning institutions. E.g., in our elections, our institutions tend to deliver the actual result of the vote. Courts tend to make decisions according to the facts and the law. Most institutions do not take bribes or bow to political pressure in doing their jobs.
We have norms whereby, e.g., leaders voluntarily leave when their term is over. Many societies descend into violence when there is to be a transfer of power. Everything else in those societies goes much worse because they can only have evil, violent people in charge, because those are the only people who win in such a system.
We built all this up over generations, but we don’t exactly know how. If we lose it, no one knows how to get it back.
c. The game theory
Different factions in society can often be viewed as facing either “Prisoner’s Dilemmas” or “coordination problems” with each other. The details of these concepts don’t matter. What’s important is this:
In either type of game, you can establish an equilibrium in which players are cooperating beneficially with each other.
If another player deviates from what they’re supposed to do, you cannot just accept that and keep cooperating; you have to retaliate. Otherwise, you’re inviting them to take unlimited advantage of you.
There are sometimes questions about what counts as non-cooperative behavior and what someone was “supposed” to do. So there is some leeway. But some behaviors are just completely clear-cut violations that have to be answered, or else you’re giving up the game.
d. Back to 2021
Now go back to the scene in January 2021. But this time, imagine that Mike Pence cooperates with Donald Trump’s plan. Pence counts the fake election certificates instead of the real ones, declaring that Trump has won Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, then declaring that Trump has won the election and will remain in office. What happens next?
Put yourself in the shoes of the Democrats. I don’t care if you hate Dems. Just pretend you’re playing a game, and this time around, you have to play the Democrats.
Understand that every one of the Democrats in this scenario 100% knows that Pence is lying. Everyone in the country saw the election results weeks ago. You also perfectly well know that the Republicans know it too, and they know that you know it, etc.
What’s your move? Go along with it and welcome Trump as the President for the next 4 years? Impossible. The system cannot be “the other side gets to declare themselves the winner if they want to”. If we’re not going along with election results, all bets are off, and we’re thrown into the situation of third-world dictatorships when someone stages a coup. If you (playing the Democrats) don’t want to completely give up everything, you have to fight this, and now that the other side is openly breaking the law, that fight is no longer restricted by the bounds of law.
So physical violence is no longer out of the question. It’s not out of the question that you have to assassinate Trump. Or you call up the police and try to have them arrest Trump. It’s not out of the question that he calls up the military and orders them to defend him against attempts to arrest him. And that there is then a schism in the military between people who want to follow Trump’s orders and people who want to forcibly remove him from office. What happens then?
Suppose the military refuses. Trump fires the general who refused, then moves on down the chain until he finds someone who will carry out his orders. If we’re stealing elections in broad daylight, it’s not clear why any of these things would be off the table.
What happens in the rest of the country? Riots across America, pro- and anti-Trump forces fighting in the streets?
I really don’t know what would have happened. This sort of completely open defiance of the procedures has never before been attempted in our history, as far as I know. However people responded, this would very likely have been the most serious constitutional crisis since the Civil War. We were saved from it only by Mike Pence’s refusal to do Trump’s bidding.
4. This Won’t Happen Again, Will It?
Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro is still planning on voting Trump, even though he knows that Trump tried to steal the 2020 election. Shapiro explained that there is no cause for concern because “the guard rails held”, and Trump can’t do the same thing again since he’s not eligible to run again after his second term.
Let me tell you how I view this. Say you’re on a bus ride on a winding mountain road. You see the driver suddenly swing the wheel to the right, trying to send the bus over the cliff. Fortunately, the guard rail on the side of the road holds, and the bus bounces back onto the road. The bus driver does this repeatedly during the drive, but every time, the guard rail holds the bus back.
When you finally get off the bus, one of your fellow passengers declares that this was an excellent bus driver. He proposes hiring this driver to drive the same group to another city.
“What are you, out of your f—ing mind?” you reply. “He tried to drive us off a cliff!”
“Oh that,” says the other passenger. “The guard rail held, so what’s the big deal? Don’t worry, this next drive won’t go by a cliff. Since the rest of his driving performance was fine, we should hire him.”
That guy is Ben Shapiro.
Do I have to spell it out, Ben? Driving off a cliff is not the only bad thing a bus driver can do. There is an indefinite number of disasters a crazy person can cause. Anyone who would try to drive a bus off a cliff can never be trusted with a bus, or indeed anything else, and if you think he’s an acceptable driver, you’re as crazy as he is.
A really, really excellent account of what is fundamentally at stake in this election. I think there are many, many other reasons why no sane and responsible person should be even slightly tempted to vote for Trump, but this piece captures the most central and important one with great cogency.
First off, I don’t care who wins the US presidential election. They’re all evil in my book. And picking sides, and getting involved in politics, just predisposes one to irrational and unclear thinking.
However, I think it’s very important to point out that 2020 was the very first election in my lifetime, where many votes were not cast in person, and instead cast via mail-in, which had previously been reserved for overseas veterans and the like.
This, in itself, was a change in the norms of voting. And did benefit the democrats (Trump was leading early in the 2020 election specifically because republicans were more likely to go to the polls, whereas mail-ins took longer to count).
So all of the actions and complaints that republicans are making, should be considered in that context. Namely, you had a huge change in the norms of voting, which benefited the democrats, which (in my opinion) does justify some amount of complaint.
This doesn’t mean that there were a lot of fake votes, or that the election was fraudulent. But large changes in, even implicit, norms around institutions does justify complaint. And I think many democrats do underestimate how easy it is to tamper with mail-in votes (I could have easily disposed of, or even falsely used, my wife’s ballot without her ever knowing). And even worse, mail-in ballots lowers the quality of the median voter, which in our world benefits democrats. A point that I would have thought Huemer would be concerned about.
And, just to be clear. I’m not saying that the reasons for the large change in norms was insidious. COVID panic was still in full swing. An argument could have been made at the time that it was better for everyone to stay home and mail-in their ballots.
Nonetheless, that is still a change in norms. And changes in such norms are themselves dangerous. And I think a lot of Trump’s actions actually do make a lot of sense, once you realize the context under which things were happening.
With respect to Michael’s claims of Trump’s misbehavior in section 2b. Here are the counter-arguments:
1) The Georgia phone does sound a bit like a mafia boss ordering people with plausible deniability. Or, it could have been just Trump telling Raffensperger how many votes they needed to win, in a tight election, with a lot of late-counted mail-in ballots. It’s tough to say.
2) There is a draft executive order to seize voting machines. But the key word there is “draft”. It is unclear, and perhaps just unlikely, that Trump had anything to do with the order. More likely that someone in his administration was upset, and wrote the draft without thinking. Trump never signed it, nor is it clear that he was even aware of its existence.
3) It’s not clear that Trump had anything to do with the fake electors. These totally could have been, and again, likely were, independent actors. After all, if you were from a swing state, and you thought that the election was fraudulent (perhaps you saw several associates cast mail-in ballots for their elderly grandparents and thought this was a common occurrence), and believed in the legitimacy of the US system, wouldn’t correcting this fraud be the right thing to do (I’m not saying it is, just trying to get you into other people’s mental states at the time)?
4) I haven’t seen evidence where Trump pressured Pence to do anything on January 6th. Though, I’m open to evidence. He did make a bunch of claims about the process which are not true, or at least the constitutionality is unclear. But this makes it seem like they met in a back room, and Trump threatened Pence, which is just not true.
5) Trump did not incite a mob to riot. A fact I learned fairly recently: Trump’s supposedly inciting speech was made, several blocks away, while the break-in at the capitol was already happening. Trump must be a wizard, because it’s tough to incite a riot, in a different place and location, while the riot is already happening. Not to mention that, while his statements are bombastic, I don’t personally think they qualify in any sense as inciting-to-riot. And Trump was careful enough to tell people to be peaceful, and tell them to go home when it was clear what was happening.