This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Serious question: is there anything the government could feasibly do now, to nudge Democrats towards accepting the result of the election in the event that Kamala loses?
Because my answer to your question is "Well, it could stop rigging elections."
Someone will inevitably cry, "But there's no clear and undisputable evidence of widespread or coordinated voter fraud sufficient to have changed the outcome of 2020!"
Sure, let's grant that. But let's also observe that setting up elections to come out the way you want them (i.e. rigging, in the most boring metaphorical sense) can be done in numerous legal and quasi-legal ways. In fact most attempts to "rig" elections are conducted in entirely legitimate ways, and people don't object because if everyone is free to do what they can to influence the outcome of the election, well, that's just democracy!
However there are at least two important institutions in our culture which we broadly expect to refrain from influencing elections. One is the government itself, including government actors like FBI agents and military personnel. Another is "the Press," that amorphous blob of journalists and corporations that purports to contribute to the political process by ensuring the dissemination of facts.
These two institutions have all but entirely abandoned the pretense of political impartiality. The recent example of 60 Minutes doctoring an interview in Kamala's favor can serve as just one instance of persistent and repeated behavior from the press. Disparities in the Justice Department's treatment of, say, 2020 DC rioters versus 2016 DC rioters can serve as just one example of persistent and repeated behavior from the government. The bureaucracy and the press are dominated by Democrats, such that a prospiracy to thumb the scales for Democratic candidates is basically inevitable.
One of my biggest problems with Donald Trump is that he often says false things that are directionally correct, which takes attention away from real problems to focus on fake ones. But one reason he might do this is simply that the truth is complicated and most people haven't got the attention span for it. I have not taken the time to make a lengthy linked catalog of ways which the government and the press abused their putative impartiality in part because most examples are, in isolation, small and easily dismissed. I'm not interested in getting dragged into a back-and-forth over the real significance of, say, dismissing Biden's violation of federal law due to his being an "elderly man with a poor memory." We used to impeach (or try to impeach) executives who used government power to hamper (or try to hamper) their political opponents. But not anymore! It's just that I notice the direction of these things, and the small examples pile up quickly.
(Well, don't worry. The FISA court ordered numerous corrective actions, which I'm sure will be followed meticulously any time they do not interfere with Democratic victories at the polls. What more do you want? Surely an impeachment would be far too much of a hassle.)
When Trump was first elected President, one common meme was for people to say and post, "NOT MY PRESIDENT." Hillary Clinton called Trump an "illegitimate President." Would you say that Democrats "accepted the results of the election" in that case? Because my read is that they very much did not, indeed still have not. Why didn't they accept the outcome of that election? What could the government have done, to nudge them toward greater acceptance?
Because if you can't answer that question, or you think it's a meaningfully different question, then I don't think anyone is in a position to give you a satisfying answer to your question, either.
Most countries have partisan press - the UK obviously, but also France (Le Figaro vs Le Monde at the quality end), Germany (FAZ vs SZ) etc. America had partisan press for most of its history (Citizen Kane is about this), and does so now. The idea that there is one respectable paper per major city, and they all form an ideological monoculture such that you can talk about "the Press" as something that should eschew political bias, is what is weird and is driven by specific features of the US advertising market in the 2nd half of the 20th century. I don't think "there is no single newspaper and/or TV station which is generally accepted as impartial" makes a country less democratic.
It wasn't just 'specific features of the US advertising market in the 2nd half of the 20th century', there was a period of ideological homogenization that preceded and was bound up in a discussion about professional ethics which drew on reformism and progressivism in the first half of the 20th century. There's a reason the Press' efforts to portray itself as neutral in the '2nd half of the 20th century' worked: they made a genuine effort to follow the ethical standards set up in prior generations and that convinced a lot of people to buy what they were selling.
This is important because you're not just going up against the leftovers of a series of material causes, you're dealing with an ideology that has deeper roots in people's sense of social right and wrong. It's not just that people look back fondly on the period and want it back, it's that they agree with what was (at least partially) achieved in that period and want it back.
More options
Context Copy link
There are some RW presses. But now you add in Google. Google puts a thumb on the scales by promoting traditional old news that are clearly LW (eg NYT, NBC, WaPo) whilst not promoting RW.
So the monopoly that Google has really puts a stranglehold on info sharing. Thank god for Elon Musk at least.
More options
Context Copy link
That all seems basically correct to me. What you seem to have left out is that America in the 20th century developed a tradition of viewing the Press as the impartial, truth-oriented watchdogs of culture and society (to the point that journalists now feel comfortable calling it a "fact check" when they disagree with someone, or even simply disapprove of the framing of an issue). The Press has grown more partisan, but public perception hasn't caught up to that--even though most people understand that some news outlets are partisan hacks, their preferred sources are exempted. Gell Mann amnesia at an institutional level, as it were.
More options
Context Copy link
It's fine if each paper has its own slant! But if they all have the same bias, you have a problem. And you have an even bigger problem if the universities that produce "professional" journalists on one side and the industry financing new paper on the other also have the same bias, so that correction becomes all but impossible. I don't think it's a coincidence that people retreat into completely independent, badly financed, broadly unreliable (but at least not reliably biased!) alternative ecosystems such as blogs and forums.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There’s a fundamental difference between being bitter about an election result and actually thinking the result was actually illegitimate. I will of course grant you that occasionally the language can appear superficially similar, but the difference is real and very important. Democrats absolutely accepted the result of the election. The process was not in question, and this was telling in the actual actions taken: they thought Russia meddled a bit too much and so the solution is policy to stop it happening again.
Hell, even after 2000, Democrats still by and large accepted the result despite some very potent arguments that they had been robbed by some uncontrollable aspect of the administrative state (broadly). Sure, you had a decent chunk of individuals who continued or even still continue to believe the election result was rigged or undemocratic or whatever, but this didn’t translate to the political class, and it didn’t lead to a fundamental dispute of elections more broadly, and in the actions, Florida got its shit together and fixed a lot of the issues for subsequent elections.
The immediate reaction of Trump and his allies was not merely bitterness but action that should be disturbing to all. They tried both literally and rhetorically to do an end run around the actual election and legal processes to corruptly (mens rea according to the evidence we’ve seen) subvert the actual election, irrespective of fact.
Do you see the difference? “Let’s fix it” is of a fundamentally different character than “let’s change it”. The former recognizes that setbacks happen in politics — even unfair ones! And it recognizes that there will be other chances and that the system is more important than ego. But the second, oh boy, it’s shortsighted and selfish and threatens the whole thing. It’s kind of like a marital fight. There is a line between some things you might say to your spouse in anger, and some things which should literally never be said, because they can’t be taken back and might threaten the entire marriage. With the assumption that the marriage is a good one - here, the assumption that the system of democratic elections is a good one.
It’s not at all clear what kind of system Trump would put in its place, which is PLENTY worrying in and of itself, but I have a very hard time imagining it being better than our current one, and I likewise have I think very good reasons to believe that even if you think for example that the Justice Department needs reform and fairness, Trump is probably one of the worst people to actually do so. That Trump’s personal motivations largely aligned with the country’s in his first term wasn’t an accident but was at least in some sense lucky - but I’m not convinced this can be taken for granted in a second term to the same degree.
I don't see the difference. It feels like salami-slicing to me. You could say this about Bernie Sanders. 'Anyone who disagrees with the integrity of the process is a rebel and an anarchist' is a just-so explanation. 'It's different when we do it' is partisan hypocrisy.
Actions speak louder than words is the test. It’s disappointing but within the realm of expectations for losers to be whiny, sad but occasional for a low-status politician to actually flail around in denial for a bit, but something else entirely when the top takes actions that are demonstrably motivated by impure motives and backed by hot air.
Look. If you ask Trump — and many have! — how exactly he lost, he refuses to answer. Even if you hold up someone like Stacey Abrams, who infamously refused to concede the Georgia governor race, if you asked her why… she will fucking tell you! It’s absolutely incredible that Trump will not do the same.
But Trump doesn’t really believe the “hard” version of the stolen election hypothesis (that machines were rigged, that the numbers were physically changed, that someone added +1000 to the other guy’s total and minused a thousand from his etc) and never has. He has gestured toward it on occasion, but he doesn’t believe it.
The proof is in his many recent interviews where he talks about 2020 and having ‘lost by a whisker’ or by a tiny bit or whatever. That’s not what people who believe they lost truly rigged elections say, they say they lost because the other guy hacked the voting machines or stuffed ballots or prevented his guys from voting.
I mean, that's arguably circumstantial evidence for @Ben___Garrison 's thesis that the 2020 stolen election narrative was a cynical ploy by an unscrupulous sore loser, because Trump was definitely saying the election was concretely stolen back then. He may not have believed it personally but it was useful for him to have followers who believed it. If nothing else, he needed to at least partially legitimize his attempt at a procedural coup - you can't concede that you lost and then try to subvert the outcome. And, as noted in OP, a stolen election narrative protects Trump's status in the party and in the eyes of his followers.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Didn’t the action they take was to spy on the Trump campaign and then bog them down in investigations that ultimately concluded the Russians did not in fact meddle? Didn’t they directly try to impeach Trump over similar issues? Didn’t the mainstream Press crow about “russiagate” for years on end? Didn’t democratic aligned judges use lawfare to nullify a democratically elected presidents policies over and over and over again? Didn’t they delay vaccine study results until after the election, murdering thousands of Americans just because Orange Man Bad?
Sorry but it doesn’t seem like they accepted Trump as the president. Wasn’t there a a whole “resistance” thing too? I mean. Sure it was fake and lame as far as resistances go, but one could argue the bureaucracy went along with it.
Spying is an overblown talking point. They spied on like, one guy? Maybe a second, and neither of them big deals?
The campaign didn’t get meaningfully “bogged down” by any investigations, not anything special counsels don’t normally do
Russiagate actually did fade pretty quickly after the Mueller report in the news and from Democratic politicians
They tried to impeach him over something almost explicitly a quid pro quo - you could argue that some presidents get a pass for that kind of thing (Nixon sure as hell did it but that wasn’t what his impeached for) but it’s still, um, bad. And note that after the effort failed in Senate vote, they dropped it. You don’t see Kamala whining about it on the campaign trail
If you think that was abnormal lawfare you have not been paying attention to politics the last several decades
Scope and scale matter. My point stands.
Catching one instance of sleazy behavior from a large group over a period of time generally implies that there's more than one instance, but that that was the instance that was easiest or luckiest to catch.
More options
Context Copy link
Your point doesn’t stand in the least. You’ve marshalled zero evidence for your dismissal nor addressed most of my points
I meant the administration, and of course it did. The news covered the mueller investigation breathlessly nonstop, over an essential nothingburger. How do you think that affects an administration?
sure after about 3 years of nonstop coverage and rampant speculation (Steele dossier? Never even existed)
It’s true, the Dems have been terrible on that for decades, but it reached a zenith.
More options
Context Copy link
No.
The ruling party in 2016 used multiple intelligence agencies to target opposition campaign personnel, on the basis of unfounded allegations presented by the ruling party candidate whose role in its generation was hidden due to its disqualifying nature, and subsequently overturned citizen-protection measures designed to protect American citizens from just such intelligence abuses, which enabled illegal leaks what would inherently have been classified information, to fuel election-year and then multiple post-election year conspiracies intended to undermine the opposition campaign and target up to cabinet level officials, conspiracies which were publicly pushed by party-affiliated media and legitimized by the party's leading member of the Senate Intelligence community.
...while campaigning that Trump would be an authoritarian who would commit security state abuses, and thus organizing the #Resistance that dominated media coverage for years to come and would help organize riots in several major American cities, including the US capital.
The original Russiagate lasted nearly half of Trump's time in office, and its narrative themes were later re-used to justify the first Trump impeachment and which remains a regular theme in Democratic C-lane social media campaigns since.
One of the presidents in question being Biden, who publicly boasted in his success to squash the corruption investigation the subject of which was the basis for impeaching Trump, not including the many other credible quid pro quo of the Biden dynasty.
The Trump experience of lawfare was abnormal precisely because it surpassed what any candidate had received in the last several decades, and on multiple grounds were highly reminiscent of mid-Cold War abuses that spurred the US Intelligence Community reforms of the 1970s and 1980s that were ignored in the process of targeting the Trump campaign. The abnormality of it was the subject of multiple extensive discussions and even deliberate justification articles posted in major media outlets and a post-2020 victory lap on the degree of cooperation required to 'fortify' the following election.
Scope and scale mattering is precisely why your point falls to a basic Russel conjugation critique.
'My favored party accepted the results reasonably and mostly peacefully despite legitimate reasons to believe they were unjustly denied their rightful victory, your party unreasonably refuses to accept the legitimacy of their defeat and threatens everything in ways that should be disturbing to all...'
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You put it much more eloquently than I could, and I might be yoinking your answer to reply to some others downthread.
More options
Context Copy link
They did not. When Hillary Clinton says Trump is an "illegitimate President," I just don't understand how you conclude that this is "superficially similar" language with a "real and very important difference." She wasn't alone. Is it your position that because she didn't say "literally illegitimate" or "actually illegitimate," we should assume she's just being rhetorical?
Russia is an easy target, of course, but listen to the examples of outright election denialism in that video. Much of it targets process, too. There are allegations of conspiracy. Trump is louder and coarser than most, but on substance he's not saying anything Democrats haven't been saying for years.
To the contrary, I would say that it translated to the political class very well, in a variety of ways. But you're not entirely wrong: the Democrats have, I think, been better at translating their losses into action. They are doing everything they can to disassemble any part of the system that doesn't guarantee their victory and continued ideological dominance of the government and the press.
I don't want to read too much into it, but I can't help but notice that after Florida decided to take elections seriously enough to avoid a repeat of 2000, it changed from "purple" to "reliably red."
And yet nothing they did is without recent precedent in Democratic opposition to election results. Democrats have refused to certify elections results. Democrats have rioted in DC. Democrats have tried to do an end run around the actual election and legal processes to corruptly subvert the actual election. None of this makes Trump's own misdeeds good, by the by; the point here is not "whataboutism." The point here is that I can't understand how anyone can pretend with a straight face that any of this hasn't been done before by the exact people now decrying it.
No: you are treating Democratic attempts to ensure their own permanent victory as "fix" while treating parallel Republican attempted to ensure their own permanent victory as "change." There is no difference of character there, much less a fundamental one. Rather, this is simply "our noble soldiers versus your barbarous brigands" in electioneering parlance.
Are you suggesting that, if Donald Trump wins in November, you would reject the outcome of that election?
Yes, we do assume Hillary was being bitter, because action wise she didn’t do jack shit about it. For anyone paying attention, you might notice that not very many Democrats followed her rhetoric either.
You shouldn’t read into Florida’s subsequent results. 9/11 happened pushing a major Bush wave… and then Obama won it twice again. Being red is recent. This should set off warning bells in your brain about personal bias that you’d even mention Florida like that, and be so flagrantly and factually wrong.
There’s some merit to the general pattern of “Democrats break X tradition for allegedly noble reasons, Republicans then see it as fair game and break X+1 tradition harder and more effectively”. Absolutely. But there’s a level of equivalence here that is just absurd.
For example. Yes. Riots in DC. Not the same as literally occupying the seat of government. These two riots are not the same. Likewise. Faithless electors your own link is talking about, uh, celebrities advocating for doing so? The whole thing was pageantry anyways as it seemed to pretty much every legal scholar everywhere that individual electors can’t actually go rogue. Contrast the Pence convincing effort or the alternate slate effort which had a (still not crazy high but not zero) chance of creating a more real crisis. It’s insane to me that you refuse to see this. At some point we moved from random House reps doing protest votes to actual, organized attempts to submit alternate electoral slates based on a sum total of zero evidence and a “throw literal shit against the wall and see if anything sticks” approach to evidence. Not. The. Same! At least hanging Chads were, you know, real.
Now note that I’m really not reading too deeply into Trump’s every word either. When he said that we wouldn’t even need to have more elections if he won it was obvious he was simply exaggerating how effective he would be about fixing problems. But new evidence about his activities in the aftermath clearly show he is ultimately corrupt in motivation and self-serving in action.
And of course with all that said, why on earth would I have a problem with the system if Trump were to win? He can and probably will get a ton of votes, all legitimately. The voting system broadly works.
As an example unless you are a gutless loser like that Georgia governor candidate, even if some halfway shady shit happens in state elections (fights about voting on the margins of the rules, like induced turnout related stuff) the typical reaction has almost always been “well let’s try harder to win more state gov’t seats next time”.
She talked about it, and that is one thing Trump also did. Is it your position that Trump's "fight like hell" comment is irrelevant and should not be raised?
Because sure: as far as I know, Hillary didn't have conversations with election officials about "finding" votes. She knew to only cheat with the aid of close confidantes, not party randos.
I intended that to be a lighthearted throwaway comment, which I intended to signal through the "I don't want to read too much into this." Sorry that wasn't sufficiently clear, I should know better than to attempt humor around here. Though you will notice that there were no actual factual errors in my comment: it was after (i.e. later in time) the election process reforms that Florida became reliably red (for now!). That should set off warning bells in your brain about personal bias, that you'd have such a... strong reaction to factual claims, just because they happen to present a narrative you don't like.
@Dean handled this one amply, I think. This is medieval thinking from you. They're not hiding the Darksaber in the podium, and besides, we have three co-equal branches of government. Democrats didn't hesitate to storm the Supreme Court building, to say nothing of state buildings. No, Democrats did not do exactly the same thing in exactly the same place as Republicans, but you seem committed to riding the "it's different when we do it" train to the very last stop. You are engaged in special pleading.
Right back at you, though, seriously. I don't like Trump. I don't like rioting. I'm happy to condemn both. I don't think it's insane to be upset about riots, whether Republican or Democrat. I think it's insane to treat Republican excess as a national emergency, while winking and shrugging at a laundry list of Democratic excesses.
I didn't ask if you would have a problem with the system. I asked, "if Donald Trump wins in November, [would you] reject the outcome of that election?"
Because you said:
I read this as you genuinely worrying that Trump would bring about an end to democratic elections. This seems like an insane worry to me, but I can imagine believing this for real. And if you did believe this for real, wouldn't it be in your interest (and the interest of the nation) to do whatever you could to prevent Trump from taking office?
Because for a lot of people in 2016, and 2020, and 2024, that seems to be the thinking. Cheating in debates or stacking primaries may not be the literal same thing as calling election officials with pointed questions about unusual polling circumstances (a water main? really?)--but it comes from the same mental attitude, namely: winning this election is more important than any standards, norms, or traditions that might be in my way. I agree that Trump gives zero fucks for standards, norms, or traditions. But it would be nice if we could stop pretending (and insisting!) that Clinton, Biden, Harris, etc. are any different in this regard. They're just (usually) slicker and sneakier about it.
More options
Context Copy link
Of course not. One riot was politically favored for prosecution and led to among the largest prosecutions in American history, and the other riot was disfavored and was not, as well as many following riots of similar partisan vein. This difference in interest of prosecution of prosecutable riots being the critical difference in prosecution is the basis of the critique, not an argument that one is not a prosecutable offense.
January 6 is not prosecutable on grounds of 'literally occupying the seat of government.' It is prosecutable on grounds of intent to disrupt the government processes, the publicized prior intent to take actions, the recorded evidence of illegal actions taken, and the jurisdiction of where it occurred. There is no distinction in the lawfulness of the acts between whether the disruption occurs inside the Congressional building itself versus other government buildings, or other places in the capital. January 6 wasn't the first time in even the preceding year that violent, disruptive, and/or intimidating protests had forced a relocation of senior government officials in the capital.
The prosecutable equivalence between events of political violence that is intended to disrupt is that they are political violence intended to disrupt. 'But their political violence was categorically different!' is special pleading, particularly when the difference is not the degree of severity of prosecution, but whether to prosecute at all.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Because of other actions surrounding what they said? While I really don't like that Hillary said the election was "stolen" and that Trump was "illegitimate", I still think there's a big difference between her comments and what Trump did. Hillary conceded almost immediately after the 2016 results were in. To my knowledge, Trump still hasn't conceded for 2020. Hillary never made phone calls demanding governors and secretaries of state "find" enough votes for them to win. Trump did. Hillary never egged on her followers to go to the capitol to protest or disrupt the electoral count. Trump, obviously, did.
You linked an article where the Dems put forward abolishing the EC in favor of a direct popular vote (or some other system), but this doesn't seem germane to the argument that EverythingIsFine is making. There wasn't a broad rejection of election results by D leaders. The closest was probably Stacey Abrams refusing to concede in Georgia, but 1) she got a ton of pushback from this from her own party, and 2) even in this most extreme example, she didn't try to interfere directly like Trump did.
What Trump did was fundamentally different from normal election reform, and thus his actions deserve to be seen differently. Dems saying we should abolish the EC (in future elections) or Rs saying we should require IDs to vote (in future elections) are very different proposals from Trump's "we need to overturn the votes from certain states (in an election that just happened).
I am utterly unmoved by your repeated resort to "it's different when we do it," which is why I asked you the question I was interested in hearing an answer to. That you have written two responses to my downstream tangents while avoiding a direct answer to my direct question strengthens my impression that your original question was disingenuous and "boo outgroup" rather than sincere, as I had hoped.
Because ultimately if you're actually interested in the government (or anyone!) doing something to convince Republicans of the legitimacy of election outcomes, such that no one riots, or questions the legitimacy of the proceedings, or attempts arcane procedural shenanigans... that same "something" should presumably also prevent riots, or questions, or shenanigans, from Democrats.
If you can't think of a way to prevent Democrats from rioting in case of a Trump win in November, then why in God's name would you think it should be possible to prevent Republicans from doing so in case Kamala wins?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A bit of an admission against interest for me, but my prior is that FL has just had an unusually-competent run of GOP state leadership with JEB Bush (who, for all his neo-con wimpiness, appears to have been a good governor), Rick Scott, and Ron DeSantis. Also, it probably says something about the state of the FL Democratic party apparatus that their two most recent standard-bearers have been an ex-Republican (Charlie Crist) and a guy who almost got pinched for laundering his campaign funds and later got himself arrested in a hotel room with overdosing gay prostitutes and meth (Andrew Gillum).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There's three general teams here. The team whose side is rigging the elections. The team who cries about rigging the elections. And the supposedly impartial group in the middle, which sees it as more important to maintain the public's belief in the sanctity of elections than to maintain the actual sanctity of elections, and sees the easiest way of doing that as silencing, ridiculing, and/or ignoring anyone who points out problems. As long as that's the case, the first team is never going to convince the second team that there isn't any rigging going on. No matter how much they contribute to the jeering and ridiculing.
Why wasn't the 2022 Wisconsin Senate race rigged? Why weren't more House races in close districts rigged when the GOP only won by 4 seats? Hell, why didn't they rig the 2018 Florida Governor race? It's weird how we're only successful at rigging some of the time, when in other countries, with actual governments that rig elections (that many of the people who are very worried about rigging in American elections prefer to the American govenrment) are always successful.
There was an attempt. Its magnitude was insufficient. It has been so in every election of my lifetime IMO. The margins of vote rigging is approximately 100k for an urban machine going to the early 80s, that has likely been increased by half or so by mail in and harvesting.
More options
Context Copy link
It's not weird at all, once you understand checks and balances, enumerated powers, and the structure of the Constitution generally. It's hard to rig American elections successfully. And yet for example "gerrymandering" is widely agreed to be a (frequently successful!) form of election rigging, even though it does not necessarily guarantee the desired outcome.
A totalitarian or even just an excessively powerful executive can afford to be hamfisted in their rigging of elections; to successfully rig an American election usually calls for greater subtlety, and even then there remains a greater likelihood of failure.
It feels like you're playing motte for the bailey above you. Nobody really denies that gerrymandering happens; we can all see it on the map. So yes, if you define gerrymandering as "rigging" (a word I personally wouldn't use to describe it) then technically US elections can be rigged to some extent. But that's very different from the claims Trump and friends are making, and indeed what many in this thread are making. Such claims involve fabricating votes wholesale up to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, or even tens of millions. In such scenarios, why not just fabricate X number of votes (whatever is needed) to win every even vaguely competitive election?
Where did someone in this thread claim “fabricating [tens of millions of] votes wholesale?”
That seems like quite an extraordinary claim and I’d love to see the evidence they presented for it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
In the past, my understanding is that vote-rigging was done by partisan machines in certain jurisdictions. I have the vague intuition that there could be quid-pro-quo deals involved (e.g. the machine agrees to stuff ballots in exchange for getting city contracts, or whatever.)
If I somehow knew that there was industrial-scale voter fraud (say, via a mathematical analysis, or it came to me in a dream) but I wasn't sure exactly how, I would presume something similar was occurring, which would be (part of) why one party wasn't in power constantly - the power of the machine(s) to commit fraud was limited and territorial, and their willingness to do so was contingent on other factors that might not always be in place (e.g. kickbacks, connections, etc.)
I should add that my historical knowledge is sketchy here, and the question of modern fraud isn't something I've really researched or have strong opinions on. It just seems like, based on what I know of how fraud worked in the United States in the past, we should expect it to work differently than top-down ballot-rigging. For instance, last year there was a (judicially recognized) stolen primary election that apparently worked via absentee ballot box stuffing. That's very different than the local political party just counting the votes however they want, which is what I presume happens in at least some "democratic" states abroad (although I'm sure it's possible that bottom-up voter fraud happens in places like e.g. Russia as well/instead of top-down finger-on-the-count type fraud).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link