What still puzzles me is how something like 45% of the country's population still supports Trump. This fact calls into question the fundamental basis of democracy, if a substantial portion of the voter base is delusional and/or irrational.
This is a strange takeaway. If the Electoral College were abolished (ie, if the US moved even more in the direction of "mass suffrage democracy"), Trump never would have been elected in the first place.
"Useless people" have human rights, and that includes voting. I think your real problem is with encouraging mass fervor towards the democratic process. It should be treated like a hobby that anyone can get into, not a religion that we actively try to convert people into.
The idea that questions of governance should be a mere "hobby" is absurd. These are deadly serious matters--matter of crime, punishment, war, life, death, etc. Little bit more important than just something you do for fun on the weekend.
Anyways, no, voting is not a "human right." But if we are going to stipulate that it is, then yes, *in theory* everyone should be super enthusiastic about it--highly rational, highly informed, etc. That is not what happens in practice, but it is most certainly the theory behind mass democracy.
I meant it should be like a hobby in terms of entrance requirements - an activity you should have to opt into rather than be sucked into. If governance is serious, then it should attract people who are serious about it, and engaging with it shouldn't be the default expectation.
There's plenty of wiggle room between the disaster we have now and outright dictatorship. But if you force it into an all-or- nothing binary choice, don't be surprised when some people make the choice you're afraid of.
By what standard is the modern democracy a disaster? It certainly has flaws, but I would prefer living in modern America to the vast majority of historical societies.
If you don't view the current state of things as a train wreck, then our worldviews are probably irreconcilable. Even if I take the viewpoint of this article, though, that would mean we have a guy who unironically attempted a coup, then he got nominated to run for president again anyways 4 years later and now he might actually win the election and return to power. Doesn't seem great!
If you think America and other democracies are a train wreck, wait until you find out about the rest of the world. You may come to the same conclusion as Churchill.
You're probably right about that. In many ways, I am dissatisfied with the state of American politics (and have been for a long time). I think that America has many problems, but calling it a disaster, especially with some historical perspective, strikes me as bizarre and hyperbolic.
Agree that pur present state of affairs is a disaster and that "democracy" is a major reason. But as terrible as Trump is, I think the Democrat agenda is worse.
But would have preferred better candidates on both sides. Real primaries and ranked-choice, instant runoff voting where more than one candidate from each major party can be in the general election would help.
I think a plurality, if not a majority, of the American electorate disagrees at this point. I'm not just talking about the Trump supporters who are very obviously trying to elect him back into office for life... the coup was a feature, not a bug for these people. I'm also talking about leftists such as myself who no longer believe in democracy.
The night Trump was elected in 2016 I decided the best course of action would be for Obama to declare martial law, completely eliminate the Republican party from this country by force, and declare himself global dictator. I've continued to hold this view for 8 years. If anything all of the events which have transpired have only convinced me of this more firmly.
So what would be a superior form of government to democracy? Left wing single party, authoritarian, totalitarian, crush all conservative thought under the boot heel of left-ism forever, for eternity. My guess is most people think that's nuts but it's a deeply held belief of mine.
A common counter-argument is "would you want to live under such a regime controlled by the opposite political party?" The answer is, of course, no. But that really doesn't matter because if that were the case then I, all my friends, and all my family would be dead or exiled... and then we wouldn't have any concerns either.
So I'm either dead or living in a left-wing utopian thought-monoculture... both far superior alternatives to have to suffer the existence of my political enemies.
Anarcho-capitalism. Markets don't suffer from the incentive problems that democracy does because consumers are more rational than voters. This will mean that markets do almost everything better than governments.
I'm mildly sympathetic to that answer, some of the things Huemer and Friedman say in defense of ancapism make sense to me. The main thing that holds me back is Chesterton's fence, I would be much more sympathetic to it if someone could point to a functional ancap society today.
Thought exercise: assume only 1 million best qualified people in the nation were granted suffrage and nothing else changed in the system. Criteria was intelligence, empathy, consciousness and interest. 50k best applicants each year get a 20 year term. Would the outcomes of this limited democracy be better or worse than the current system?
My bold claim is that we can incrementally improve on the current system limiting the degree of democracy while remaining democratic.
Ha, ha, ha, who decides who the best voters are? I'm certainly going to think that people whose agenda match my own are the ones meeting your criteria.
I am not sure that I don't want "stupid" people to vote. Who knows whether the "stupid" person sees something that isn't obvious to me?
That said, yes, many people who vote are in my opinion quite misinformed.
I mean, the brilliance of the Venician Republic and the Doge was the consideration in how you pick who to vote. You definitely don't want a monoculture, but you want people who have good judgment. Giving everyone equal vote regardless of interest, capacity seems like an easy system to improve on.
Mencken and Shakespeare also were against mass suffrage, so you're in good company. (Perhaps, a future post: "The Steelman Case Against Democracy" [and the substitute, I guess, would have to be stringent standards for voting or perhaps Mencken's idea of a constiutionally shackled, mostly ceremonial monarchy.])
Few people are “irrational” except for maybe demonstrably crazy people (even they often demonstrate rationality). The “irrational” slur is just lazy thinking; it’s akin to a Marxist accusing someone of “false consciousness”. Anyone we disagree with can be labeled “irrational”.
The main problem with the electorate (and people in general) is ignorance, which is the actual threat to democracy. But we don’t really have democracy anyway; we have elected oligarchy. But sometimes the people get a bit uppity and the defenders of democracy (oligarchy) get upset.
Ignorance is a problem, but the main problem would be that people vote based on selfishness or fear or reasons other than simply choosing what's best for the country.
That doesn't surprise me, it is easily explained through the instinctual operation of in-group, prestige and frequency bias in cultural (meme) transmission.
What does surprise me is how few of what Hanania calls "elite human capital" (EHC) on the right have done what Benham is doing here, and Michael Huemer has done
EHC are people for whom individual learning (analysis of the facts) and direct bias (assessing the reliability of the meme transmission one receives as to whether to adopt it) are sufficiently well-developed to override the three instinctual biases mentioned above.
Uh, yes. Historically “democracy” was seen as a degenerate and hedonistic mob state whose net impact was to put the fate of a nation at the whim of people who barely had time to care about how taxes work. That’s why until very recently the few extant democracies limited their voting class to a very small number of elite individuals who were usually educated and had high stakes in the efficiency of government.
I cannot emphasize enough that literally for millennia “Democracy killed Socrates” was the core impression most political thinkers had about democracy.
It calls democracy into question that people would subvert democracy?
You are assuming that most people support Trump because they believe everything he says (and not even that they agree with him trying to do this). This is of course not true.
It was Jefferson who wrote that a well-informed populace is essential to democracy... and Tim Urban's recent book talks about how both the red and blue golems (but particularly the red) in our system are playing anti-democratic games. It won't hold for much longer at this rate.
But, I'd gently correct one bit of your comment. It isn't delusion or irrationality that's driving most people's continued support – its living in an alternate, uninformed reality. Most have no idea about the fake electors scheme. They have no idea how poorly formed the court challenges were. They think there was something there, that some technicalities or elite manipulation prevented the truth from coming out.
They believe that because its what Trump told them.
Democracies can and do fail, and they fail when demagogues realize how easy it is to exploit anger and fear, how easy it is to lie boldly and selfishly, and how much there is to gain by playing games which are incompatible with democracy... its the other side who has to still play by the rules of civil society. So, yes. Democracy has a fatal flaw, history has shown us how it can be exploited, and its being actively exploited by the right this time around. Its why i'm voting for Kamala despite never having voted blue before in my life.
It's not obvious that the stolen election narrative isn't true. As a Republican voter I often comment in conservative spaces that it's BS (I try and correct my own tribe at times) and in the few times I've tried to do a deeper dive on it the claim seems to have no substance. But who knows?
It is annoying that we are headed into another election where not enough has been done to prevent another round of vote fraud claims. The post election season could be very rough in this country no matter who wins.
It isn't obvious, that's fair. it requires a lot of work to arrive at the truth, especially when liars are abundant. Its Brandolini's law: The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
My take is that nothing would be enough. Its too easy to grab six second clips, lie about them on telegram, and let the B.S. get halfway around the world before the truth has gotten its shoes on. No amount of election protections would give people faith if they don't trust any institution at all.
It is perfectly rational to support an attempt to overthrow democracy by your own party. After all, the reason you support your party is that you want it to be in power.
They are perfectly rational, they just don't believe what they say.
There's a rhetorical move, that shouldn't be done, where someone says "make a bingo card" against common rebuttals, as if making a bingo card does any work whatsoever (it doesn't) in refuting those rebuttals. It's a rhetorical move I find annoying and see too often.
Some of those seem to have pretty reasonable readings, though?
Standing vs merits definitely affects how strong evidence you take the court cases to be. (Or are you disputing that whatever amount were dismissed on standing? I'm not familiar with that; I'm just taking your word for it.)
Looking at Trump's speech preceding the capital incursion, he also there indicates that what he wanted was to exert pressure on Republican moderates in a peaceful manner, not to carry out a violent coup.
He did suggest that the national guard should be present.
Are any of these enough to say that his actions surrounding January sixth were not terrible? Certainly not; he should never have done what he did. But I don't see why those are refuted?
>He did suggest that the national guard should be present.
This belongs on the bingo card. Trump suggested the National Guard to show up to protect his protestors. And he is the chief executive - the only person who can deploy the National Guard in DC unless he becomes incapacitated. He decided not to and watched TV for 3 hours and continued to make phone calls with Rudy Giuliani to pressure congressmen into certifying their fradulent electoral votes throughout the riot in the Capitol.
> Standing vs merits definitely affects how strong evidence you take the court cases to be. (Or are you disputing that whatever amount were dismissed on standing? I'm not familiar with that; I'm just taking your word for it.)
"Standing" decisions comes in various favors. Sometimes it can be completely orthogonal to the merits, however standing is oftentimes deeply entwined with the merits. For example, one of the essential components of standing is proof of legal injury, which has to be proven with evidence. If you allege injury, then the merits question is whether that injury is one you can recover from. So many people who claimed election fraus sued, had no evidence of any ballots, and then were tossed out. The courts may not have decided whether those hypothetical ballots were legal, but the decision still defeats claims of fraud.
Furthermore, Candidate Trump would obviously have had standing to contest ballots in any lawsuit if he had evidence that they were cast. The fact that he didn't sign on to most of these suits is strong evidence that they are full of shit.
Finally, there were court cases decided on the merits. I believe the 8th circuit described the evidence presented on the merits as zero.
> Looking at Trump's speech preceding the capital incursion, he also there indicates that what he wanted was to exert pressure on Republican moderates in a peaceful manner, not to carry out a violent coup.
This is simply not what Trump said when he instructed the mob to head down to the capitol, and it certainly does not reflect his actions after he knew what was going on.
"I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard."
"Today we will see whether Republicans stand strong…"
"The Democrats are hopeless — they never vote for anything. Not even one vote. But we're going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones because the strong ones don't need any of our help. We're going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country."
Those quotes all look like what I said.
To be clear, when I said "indicates that what he wanted was…not to carry out a violent coup," I did not mean that he said something like "don't carry out a violent coup" (aside, I suppose, from "peacefully and patriotically"). What I was saying was that his speech is, as I said, instructing his people to be pushing the Republican moderates to agree with him, and that what he is pushing for there is clearly something separate from a violent coup.
Sure, and I basically agree that those arguments you’ve listed are bad, but the act of placing them in the bingo card isn’t what’s doing the refuting. Its actual function is that of mockery, more or less.
You missed Ray Epps using his mind control powers (given by the FBI; he is their most powerful warrior) to force them to break into the Capitol against their will because he said something the previous night.
I endorse this entire essay. Recognizing that the bar is EXTREMELY low, what's the "best" substantive defense of the fake elector scheme that you've encountered?
The single most effective argument in support the stolen election meme is the same reason why the vast majority of its adherents actually do believe it. Simply put, the president of the United States, and the twice-nominated leader of the Red political faction said it had been.
Republican elites and media had had plenty opportunity to shut down Trump in 2011 when he started babbling about Obama not being born in Hawaii. Romney could have chosen not seek Trump's endorsement in 2012. The party could have made a deal with the other Republican candidates to all withdraw and endorse Cruz in early 2016 to block Trump, as the Democratic elite did with Sanders in 2020. The fact that they did none of this meant Trump was judged as fit for office, when he was manifestly not, as later events have borne out.
You cannot wait to be sure on these things, that doesn't work. It's like the hundreds of thousands of dead in Ukraine because Biden dithered with Putin.
On that's the second most effective argument. The most effective argument was if one was actually paying attention to what was happening on election night.
Ok, the other argument is that fact that the Democrats are constantly fighting tooth and nail to prevent even basic common sense election security measures, like *making sure the voter is who he says he is*.
That’s not right. The charge you make about Democrats is not unique to 2020. People have been pointing that out for a long time. And yet there were not scores of millions of Republicans believing that Bush, Dole, McCain or Romney had actually won. Recall the skewed polls meme in 2012. It was briefly a thing and then vanished, I suspect many people didn’t even know it was a thing.
But the 2020 fraud meme had more legs, and four years later it is a big as ever. Why? Because Trump pushes it
The direction here is clear. The claim is the first step, the driver of the belief. Without it no large-scale belief gets implanted into millions upon millions of Republican brains. The observations you make come after the initial claim, in an effort to find some justification for a pre-existing belief.
There is none except ones based on lies and flagrant deceptions. They'll refer to the 1960 Hawaii case, but in 1960 it was done through the courts and they only used the alternate slate after winning there, rather than having them skulking around and telling their electors things like "When you arrive, please state to the guards that you are attending a meeting with either Senator Brandon Beach or Senator Burt Jones and proceed directly to the room. Please, at no point should you mention anything to do with Presidential Electors or speak to media" as occurred with this case. There's a reason that an Arizona false elector has already plead and many are being charged.
(Also, 1960 Hawaii was not outcome determinative, then-VP Nixon was pushing to take away EVs from his party, Nixon asked that it not be used as precedent going forward, and it was unanimously accepted by the joint session, none of which was true of Trump's false electors. Nixon had more character than Trump.)
Me, trying desperately to justify Trump's attempted coup: "Uhm, you didn't consider the election where they ended Reconstruction by murdering a bunch of black Republicans, though."
Analogy? What is the analogy? You're citing the most notoriously corrupt election in American history as evidence that what Trump did was fine. It's prima facie moronic.
If you want me to get into the details of what is different, the the 2020 false electors WERE NOT selected by state governments, whereas in 1876, they were. The state governments do in fact have the authority to send whatever electors they want. We now live in a more democratic era so they generally send electors who vote according to the will of the people of the state.
There's the synchronized stopping of the reported count across multiple states flowed by statistically impossible jumps for Biden, the numerous instances of observers being kicked or tricked out of the counting room followed by the count resuming, in one case the counters literally boarding up the windows of the counting room so observers can't see what the counters are up to, the video recordings of counters feeding the same ballots multiple times through the machines, the multiple eyewitness affidavits, the miscellaneous statistical irregularities, etc.
More generally, how the Democrats are constantly moving heaven and earth to try to prevent even basic common sense anti-fraud measures, like *making sure the voter is who he says he is*.
> These have all been disproven. Also the case in which people were boarding up windows was to prevent Trump protesters from interfering with the counting process which they were attempting to do.
How? By using their telekinetic powers?
Or do you mean that being able to see the counting process would somehow interfere with it, like maybe because their plan for "the counting process" involved doing some funny business that they didn't what seen?
It saddens me that most of my fellow conservative friends, whom I otherwise consider intelligent, have deluded themselves into thinking this isn’t utterly disqualifying.
> I asked you for any proof of a "brazenly fraudulent" election.
You didn't, but now that you have:
There's the synchronized stopping of the reported count across multiple states flowed by statistically impossible jumps for Biden, the numerous instances of observers being kicked or tricked out of the counting room followed by the count resuming, in one case the counters literally boarding up the windows of the counting room so observers can't see what the counters are up to, the video recordings of counters feeding the same ballots multiple times through the machines, the multiple eyewitness affidavits, the miscellaneous statistical irregularities, etc.
More generally, how the Democrats are constantly moving heaven and earth to try to prevent even basic common sense anti-fraud measures, like *making sure the voter is who he says he is*.
This is a narrative description of fraud, not a "proof", which i asked since the first comment.
A proof would indicate in which state, in which city, in which section there was a synchronised stop. At which exact time the stop was. What was the vote count before and after the stop. Why a jump was statistically impossible, etc....
Basically a proof is specific evidence that would convince a rational mind, not any unspecified tale.
The Sidney Powell affidavits were hilarious. There's a court recording where the judge is yelling at her and her lawyers for not vetting any of the affidavits and not coming prepared with the supposed voter ballot laws they claimed were being violated in the affidavits, but I don't remember the link.
This is all horseshit. If you’re reading this Substack, you should at least attempt to be rational instead of repeating known falsehoods. For example the boarding up the windows thing, those people were not observers, they were protesters disrupting the vote count. The observers were on the inside of those windows with the counters. If your brain wasn’t completely melted away by confirmation bias you would have looked this up at some point in the last four years.
Timely, my most recent post is my long-form reply to this. I think that we can sit here and quibble about whether Trump really attempted a "coup"--after all, some people will argue that what he wanted Mike Pence to do was technically legal/constitutional, and such like. We can also disagree about whether he really "knew he lost" or not, I think you are too uncharitable in your interpretation. I don't think any of this ultimately matters though.
The real question here is just how much we truly value "Our Democracy." This is the implied conflict going on when people argue about whether Trump is really a threat to "Our Democracy" or not. The contempt with which the right views this phrase--"Our Democracy," repeated by liberals as if part of a sacred liturgy--should be informative on this point. The truth of things, if we are capable of being honest, is that we value "Our Democracy" as the status quo so long as it is sufficiently aligned with our interests and preferences.
If we imagine a world in which society had "democratically" decided to enact overwhelmingly conservative preferences--for the sake of example, let's suppose the criminalization of any homosexual relations, also of abortion, a near-total ban on immigration, an end to no-fault divorce, and so forth and so on--then all the liberals who today love to harp on about the value of "Our Democracy" would be singing a different tune. Indeed we already witnessed this in the sharp ferocity with which our rulers turned upon "free speech" the moment they perceived that it no longer sufficiently served their interests.
As for me, I do not support Donald Trump, because I do not trust him to improve the situation (in part because of his actions after the 2020 elections). But I don't pretend to like "Our Democracy" either. Most people who support Trump do so because they hold the status quo in absolute, utter contempt. The notion that he threatens the status quo is therefore a feature in their minds, not a bug. The conservative perception, largely correct in my view, is that the left are honor-free scoundrels who will stop at nothing to win at all costs, and that they constantly get away scot-free with lying, cheating, and all manner of other totally unacceptable, "rule-breaking" sorts of behavior. Thus, to hold Donald Trump in particular contempt by comparison feels absurd.
Great reply and very true. This quote comes to mind: “Democracy has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is a soft variant of communism, and rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else.”
There's an incredibly important object-level question here which you failed to address: Is Democracy valuable?
And the obvious answer is: Immensely.
Whether people would abandon a system altogether if it started allowing pedophilia or murder is entirely irrelevant to the question of whether or not the system is useful and good in the first place. Or even if they would abandon it just because the wrong guy won.
Democracy is precious. What you imagine Democrats would do in an imagined hypothetical in your imagination is completely irrelevant to anything. Even if we knew for a fact your imaginings were accurate, it would still be completely irrelevant.
>Whether people would abandon a system altogether if it started allowing pedophilia or murder is entirely irrelevant to the question of whether or not the system is useful and good in the first place. Or even if they would abandon it just because the wrong guy won.<
On the face of it, this makes absolutely no sense what so ever. If one system allows murder and the other does not, this fact obviously cuts in favor of the latter system. If this is the only piece of information you have about the two systems, you pick the second one.
"Democracy" is, at least in theory, a vehicle to achieving good governance, i.e. correct policies. The value of "Democracy" thus directly depends on whether it is actually able to enact good policies or not. It is trivial to observe that at some point, if the policies enacted by a particular system are harmful and insane enough, people may begin seeking to change that system. Divorced from policy outcomes, "democracy" has little if any inherent value of its own. Political systems are not religions (or shouldn't be).
I laid this out in the post I referenced at the beginning of the note.
You can use a hammer to kill somebody, you can use a handgun to kill somebody, this does not make them equivalent.
You can use democracy to implement bad policy, you can use dictatorship to implement bad policy. this does not make them equivalent.
The nature of these things are different. Their incentives and uses are different. This significantly impacts their effect on the world. Dictatorships create death and oppression. Democracies create wealth and human rights.
>Divorced from policy outcomes, "democracy" has little if any inherent value
This is like saying if medicine killed people it would be bad- trivially true and totally irrelevant. The actual policy outcomes we observe IN THE REAL WORLD, not philosophical hypotheticals, are the difference between North and South Korea. They're the difference between food on your plate and a gun in your mouth.
Democracy is precious. If you recognize that as the 110% truth that it is, then we agree on everything I care about in this conversation.
Okay, so you understand my point, you just think Democracy always gets everything right, more or less. Your personal view of how much good/bad policy Democracy produces is entirely beside the point. Obviously we are going to disagree on a question like that and our views won't be reconcilable. My point is simply that, if enough bad policy is produced, it becomes an imperative to reform, replace, or otherwise change the current system into something else--just as, if a gun begins to continuously misfire, eventually you will stop using it and get a different weapon.
>The actual policy outcomes we observe IN THE REAL WORLD, not philosophical hypotheticals, are the difference between North and South Korea.<
Worth pointing out that this is a retarded black-or-white fallacy. "The real world" is most certainly not a binary choice between "Our Democracy" or Literally North Korea.
It's the worst system besides all the rest, which are much much worse.
You can suppose that there's a better choice than "our democracy" out there somewhere, but the greatest, most prosperous, most free nations in the world are all democracies. It's more likely you're just wrong.
And it's not just literally every observable metric that point towards democracy beating everything else, there are strong theoretical reasons to believe it's superior too. It aligns incentives to protect citizens from the government, it incentivizes the government to create public goods instead of just paying off an elite class, it maximizes the amount of information in the system.
It doesn't do these perfectly, but every known system is worse at them than democracy.
And it's just morally superior. Governments should be formed with the consent of the governed, not imposed by force.
Usually most critiques of democracy basically come from: "If just this one group was allowed to vote then we'd implement my policy and then everything would be great," but that's just not what happens. The group becomes an aristocracy that the government taxes everyone else to pay off, they implement their policies and it goes horribly, because sometimes other groups have a point and know something you don't, or it accustoms people to being ruled without consent and then we actually do end up in a North Korea situation.
Congrats- you have an idea. I have a history book full of people who had ideas. And a twitter feed. And a reddit feed. And a substack feed.
>You can suppose that there's a better choice than "our democracy" out there somewhere, but the greatest, most prosperous, most free nations in the world are all democracies. It's more likely you're just wrong.<
I can easily speculate that "democracy" is a confounding variable here, if we really want to play this game. Nations like Spain and England were already the world powers of their day while they were still monarchies, well before they made the transition to proper democracies. Peoples of European descent have ruled the world for the past 500 years despite transitioning through a wide variety of different governance structures during those centuries. It is only just now within the past 20 years or so that there has been even the hint of any competition--from China, a nation which is most certainly not democratic in the Western sense. The key variable thus may not be "democracy," but rather simply being white.
Another notable feature of your viewpoint is its absolutism. A single counter-example will invalidate it completely. Several hundred years ago, there was not a single "democracy" (as we conceive of them today) anywhere on Earth--then there was one, and then there were many. Before this emergence, an observer could have scoffed at the notion of replacing monarchy with democracy by appealing to your same logic ("all the best countries that exist now are monarchies!").
The future is uncertain and is not guaranteed to resemble the past. All improvements in governance stem from people who, having reached some level of dissatisfaction with their current arrangement, reach out and attempt to find something better. The governance of the future will almost certainly follow this pattern in the sense that "Our Democracy" will, eventually, be improved upon in some way by people who are fundamentally dissatisfied with its current glaring flaws. I will grant that I don't think Donald Trump is particularly qualified to be the person making those improvements, but my intent here is to illustrate the motivations behind people who support him.
>Usually most critiques of democracy basically come from: "If just this one group was allowed to vote then we'd implement my policy and then everything would be great," but that's just not what happens. The group becomes an aristocracy that the government taxes everyone else to pay off, they implement their policies and it goes horribly, because sometimes other groups have a point and know something you don't, or it accustoms people to being ruled without consent and then we actually do end up in a North Korea situation.<
Completely backwards. "If just this one group was allowed to vote then we'd implement my policy and then everything would be great"--yes, by definition, this would be the case if only Republicans could vote (or only Democrats, if you're a leftist). Your accounting of how this situation progresses is also the inverse of actual US history. The US began with only a very narrow group of people allowed to vote. Rather than this group becoming an entrenched aristocracy, the franchise was extended out again and again, eventually encompassing everyone of any quality whatsoever, with the result that an entire half of the political arena is now predicated largely on simply paying useless people to vote for them in exchange for patronage.
"If we imagine a world in which society had "democratically" decided to enact overwhelmingly conservative preferences--for the sake of example, let's suppose the criminalization of any homosexual relations, also of abortion, a near-total ban on immigration, an end to no-fault divorce, and so forth and so on--then all the liberals who today love to harp on about the value of "Our Democracy" would be singing a different tune. Indeed we already witnessed this in the sharp ferocity with which our rulers turned upon "free speech" the moment they perceived that it no longer sufficiently served their interests."
Well, I mean, I support having the US Supreme Court strike down any bans on child sex dolls/robots that Our Democracy might push through, through either the ballot box or their elected representatives. Does that count for this? I don't want individual rights, especially those deemed vital, to be in the hands of majoritarian mobs!
Sure, that's a great example, because in the eyes of conservatives the left has already weaponized the courts long ago. Roe v Wade and Obergefell are two of the easiest examples of a subverted judiciary being used to bypass our heckin' "democracy." No one really believes in "the will of the people" when it comes to their most sacred values, whether they're left right or anything else.
Yeah, I mean, some of SCOTUS’s most notable decisions were extremely controversial when they were decided, so SCOTUS shouldn’t cuck on the child sex dolls/robots question, at least not in an ideal world. Denying minor-attracted persons that opportunity for a satisfactory harm-free sex life (specifically to those of them who are capable of being permanently satisfied by such dolls/robots) would be extraordinarily cruel.
This is also a major drawback with a cure to aging. For those of us who value social progress, a cure to aging would make social progress much harder since it would ensure the survival of past generations with backwards political views indefinitely. A lot of times, a population’s political views change as a result of generational change, not as a result of people changing their minds.
I almost entirely agree. I think a big factor though is that he has *just* enough plausible deniability in all the well-known individual cases to make a semi-reasonable defense possible. E.g. he told the J6 mob to march "peacefully", or that "find
11,780 votes" can just mean trying to uncover that much genuine fraud, not a call to manufacture votes.
Overall, I think it's beyond reasonable doubt that Trump wanted and tried to stay in power based on mere allegations of fraud, and achieving this would amount to a coup. But this requires evaluating all of his actions as a whole, not because any one singular action passes the reasonable doubt threshold.
I think Republican ambivalence towards this has also been influenced by a certain amount of "crying wolf" about Trump in different areas, and low trust in media and institutions that is not entirely without merit. "Trump attempted a coup? Well, previously it was 'Trump is a Russian agent' and before that 'Trump is the next Hitler'. What's next?" Whereas if this has been 1974 again, where the media were more trusted and political rhetoric less hyperbolic and polarised, Trump's actions would have rightfully seen as far worse than Watergate.
>I almost entirely agree. I think a big factor though is that he has *just* enough plausible deniability in all the well-known individual cases to make a semi-reasonable defense possible. E.g. he told the J6 mob to march "peacefully", or that "find 11,780 votes" can just mean trying to uncover that much genuine fraud, not a call to manufacture votes.
I don't understand why people think Trump's psychology is such a mystery. He was repeating the Georgia ballot box under the table hoax until his speech on Jan 6. This was debunkable by just watching the full video rather than the one Rudy Giuliani spliced. After the Raffensperger phone call, he tweeted out "I spoke to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger yesterday about Fulton County and voter fraud in Georgia. He was unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the ballots under table scam, ballot destruction, out of state voters, dead voters, and more. He has no clue!" when in fact they countered all of his voter fraud claims. He was intentionally maliciously lying about voter fraud the entire time. And saying he told his protestors to peacefully protest the ceritification of the election after calling them out to "take back their country" and hyping up the event on twitter for multiple days and saying the people who refused to walk through the magnetometers with their weapons because they "weren't there for him" is insane.
When voters aren’t required to show up to vote in person on election day ,when voting is conducted during a once in a lifetime pandemic, allowing for once in a lifetime voting procedures one might expect irregularities to occur.
When the sitting president’s legitimacy and competency are challenged from day one by all of the MSM with an abundance of bogus claims ( Russian hoax) etc. , one may understand the consideration of voter fraud in some circles.
> one may understand the consideration of voter fraud in some circles.
Yes. I understand perfectly the consideration of voter fraud: you are mad your guy didn't win and are fine with lying to pretend otherwise. More than fine - you prefer it! That's why Fox got fucked in the Dominion lawsuit, they were afraid of their viewers leaving to go watch more dishonest news sources if they didn't entertain the dishonest claims of voter fraud, so they ignored all their fact checkers telling them it was bullshit.
There's no need to do "election fraud apologism." There simply wasn't election fraud. That's why every single time you people have your feet held to the fire and asked to provide any substantive evidence, you can't.
> That's why every single time you people have your feet held to the fire and asked to provide any substantive evidence, you can't.
You mean aside from the synchronized stopping of the reported count across multiple states flowed by statistically impossible jumps for Biden, the numerous instances of observers being kicked or tricked out of the counting room followed by the count resuming, in one case the counters literally boarding up the windows of the counting room so observers can't see what the counters are up to, the video recordings of counters feeding the same ballots multiple times through the machines, the multiple eyewitness affidavits, the miscellaneous statistical irregularities, etc?
More generally, how the Democrats are constantly moving heaven and earth to try to prevent even basic common sense anti-fraud measures, like *making sure the voter is who he says he is*.
Name a single actual specific case of serious voter fraud. I don't mean some random guy pretending to be his grandpa, I mean serious numbers of votes being distorted. Do not list out ten things. I will then investigate this SINGLE, SPECIFIC case of election fraud, one wherein you provide enough detail for me to corroborate and look into details. If it is ACTUALLY fraud, I will change my opinion. If you do not do this, I will take it as a concession that there was no voter fraud and you're just a lying hack fuck.
Or do you have an innocent explanation for the synchronized stopping of the reported count across multiple states flowed by statistically impossible jumps for Biden, the numerous instances of observers being kicked or tricked out of the counting room followed by the count resuming, in one case the counters literally boarding up the windows of the counting room so observers can't see what the counters are up to, the video recordings of counters feeding the same ballots multiple times through the machines, the multiple eyewitness affidavits, the miscellaneous statistical irregularities, etc?
Rather the courts refused to even look at it. I suspect they didn't want to deal with the messy fallout, especially considering the left had just stage "fiery but mostly peaceful protests" in the major cities.
Hey, remember when a couple hours ago, you linked a source containing "evidence" of fraud, and its very first cite for a claim of fraud was "I made it the fuck up"? Did that make you consider even for a single second that you might be wrong?
The election was stolen because it's very clear from credible anecdotes that there was widespread fraud. The evidence did not hold up in court because the entire judicial system is corrupt, just like the DOJ, the media and the FBI.
This is the most simple and logical explanation: Occam's razor and all that jazz.
People love to talk about how the importance "having peaceful, universally recognized-as-legitimate transfer of power", and then become indignant that the suggestion that someone would approve a result he knows or highly suspects to be fraudulent in the name of "preserving legitimacy".
The consideration is fine. If people initially trusted Trump and decided to look into the evidence and changed their minds, I would be perfectly happy to respect them. But the total unwillingness to grapple with the facts or have any sense of self-reflection is galling.
"Trump repeated the claim that more than 10,000 dead people voted, even after it had been investigated, and the real number was 12."
Just playing devil's advocate here, but shouldn't it be concerning that any dead people voted at all? If 12 cases were able to be definitively proven, couldn't there have been many more cases that weren't detected? Any proveable fraud, no matter how small, makes it seem possible that it occured on a larger scale and just wasn't detected. I would argue that when even miniscule levels of fraud are found, that the burden of proof is to prove the election was actually genuine, not to prove it was fraudulent.
> Any proveable fraud, no matter how small, makes it seem possible that it occured on a larger scale and just wasn't detected.
No? This is the same argument for "we've flipped over less than 5% of the Sahara, therefore there could be a secret highly advanced lost civilization there" or "we've only explored a tiny percentage of the ocean, so Megaladon could still be alive." The fact that a very small number of cases were found is evidence there was not a large number of cases.
While who you vote for is secret, who voted is public record. It would be trivial to determine if dead people voted, let alone 10,000. There's no reason to doubt the 12 number.
> It would be trivial to determine if dead people voted
One would think so. It should also be trivial to determine if dead people are on the voter rolls and remove them, and yet whenever people attempt that they get sued by Democratic activists or even the DOJ.
When questioned about this, activists give excuses like "maybe the person in the obituary record is a different person from the person on the voting role who just happens to have the same name", and similar excuses that can be used to create enough reasonable doubt.
Why aren't Republicans falsifying so many votes if it's so easy to do it? Even if the corrupt courts ruled in favor of Democrats - which you say they already are doing - why not at least try to win the federal popular vote or something? It's not like they would have anything to lose since the courts are already weaponized against them.
"Most Republicans seem to agree that what happened on January 6th was a big nothingburger"
Of course they do. They can hardly admit to being in favour of a treasonous attempt to seize power that failed. But they wouldn't have supported him so overwhelmingly since them if they didn't hope he might one day succeed, and forever eliminate the danger of Democrats winning the executive office.
If you genuinely believe that, you must have been furious with Trump. The only sitting president in world history so incompetent as to allow the challenger to blatantly steal an election from him. And without either he or any of his officials able to prove it in court. Even in courts whose judge was appointed by his own party. Just how *dumb* you must think he was.
Except, of course, that no Republican thinks Trump was a fool for allowing the challenger to steal the election. Because they don’t genuinely believe Trump allowed the challenger to steal the election.
That’s what makes it clear they don’t seriously believe what they are saying.
According to the Republican Party, he is also much better than any of the Republican primary contenders even though, according to themselves, he was the only sitting President in world history too incompetent to stop the challenger from stealing the election from him.
As I said, Republican don't actually believe what they are saying.
So you have moved on from declaring that Trump alone was too incompetent a president to stop his own challenger from rigging the ballot, to declaring that all incumbent Republicans are too incompetent to stop their own challenger from rigging the ballot.
As I said, this is how I know you don't believe what you are saying.
I don't think Trump thought he lost. I think he was just egocentric enough and delusional enough to think he won. You can see this, for example, in how he's continued to spend large amounts of money on trying to prevent election fraud in the 2024 election, which is a big waste if you don't think there's fraud going on, and harmful to his own interests.
I still think January 6th was very bad, but everything looks like a less crazy path of action if you're acting under the assumption that there actually was a ton of fraud, that the electoral counts were totally illegitimate, etc. Now, that assumption was false, but I think Trump thought it was true.
Likewise, I'm pretty sure he had his lawyers pushing for him that this was the proper plan to contest the fraud. (And there has been some (probably dubious) precedent of alternate slates of electors in a handful of previous elections.)
Merely saying that people debunked his statements does not prove that he believed their debunkings. People generally have a hard time being convinced of things that they're invested in not being true.
> I don't think Trump thought he lost. I think he was just egocentric enough and delusional enough to think he won.
This is equally, if not more so, disqualifying. If you have a close group of advisers you trust who all tell you the same thing on an issue of fact, to continue to believe the opposite is insanity if you have no other evidence. It's the upholding of dogmatic belief over any rational consideration of fact. That is not a trait a leader should ever exhibit.
> Merely saying that people debunked his statements does not prove that he believed their debunkings. People generally have a hard time being convinced of things that they're invested in not being true.
This is not a workable standard. It invites left-wingers to do precisely the same thing w.r.t mental states i.e claim that they were unconvinced by all contrary evidence and then carry out crimes in service of left-wing ideologies. It would fundamentally render the law weaker and increase the violence we can realistically expect in our lives.
It actually doesn't matter at all whether he knew it was 'true.' He lost. This defense of 'oh, well he is dumb enough and irrational enough to believe it was stolen' is not even a defense. It boggles my mind to see people make it. Just stop. Jesus.
Bingo, rationalist types often demonstrate (as here) a model of how (other) people believe (even propositional) things that is just not true, but is just subtly enough wrong to not be obvious. It's funny; there are LW posts from The Sequences describing beliefs as more of a network and as motivated by many things, yet when it comes to characterizing Trump (for example), they forget all that, and model him as simply believing-or-not, instead of a much fuzzier thing driven by his narcissism.
Because there is ample evidence he was lying and knew he was lying, it's just that many people commenting on this are low info knuckle draggers that clearly haven't engaged with the issue at all beyond what Matthew wrote in this post.
I don't think the case against Trump is partisan. I agree with this article. I also think that Democrats are doing everything they can to make it seem partisan.
This is especially true regarding the case against Trump in New York. That case is partisan, I hope you'll agree. The Democratic machine throwing their support behind Bragg poisons the well.
Also after the history of the Mueller investigation, which turned out to be a nothing burger, the faith in the system is (justifiably?) eroded among the GOP base.
Then again, I have no doubt the Republicans would also abuse the system against their political opponents if they could, so I guess I can't blame the Democrats too much.
I don’t think Mueller was a nothing burger. I think he found plenty of crooked stuff but he just didn't think it was his place to take it to it’s logical conclusion.
it is disturbing that US has unreliable election process
no one sane in Britain, France, Germany , any EU country, and a large number of normal countries in global South is satisfied with the level of election process in US
no observers
no credible paper trail that allows recount
Again, no observers either from opposing candidate or from foreign organizations /states e.g. EU, UN, Russia, India, BRICS.
it is very disturbing to witness almost unanimous efforts by deep state to openly support falsehoods, lies aimed at one candidate
several well known examples like Hunter Biden‘s laptop
it is also disturbing tham mainstream media are unified in supporting one side only, resorting to psychology warfare instead of reporting
Conclusion from a European:
it is possible that significant efforts were invested to manipulate mail votes,
and it is possible that majority for Biden was a result of these efforts.
Can we call it stealing an election ? Yes.
We are now a few weeks before the equally important election, and all the problems that make result look suspicious to honest observer have not been solved.
Nowhere in developed world can a person vote without identifying her/himself.
In civilised countries EACH voting position, has a team of people working on organising election, AND observers from both political parties, guaranteeing that there can be no election fraud.
Recount
How do you do a recount with voting machines?
How do you do recount if you do not have
A. a list of voters, who have identified themselves, and
B a corresponding exact number of votes
US does not have it.
It doesn't mean that elections have been stolen, it means one can never say whether the election has been stolen.
Poll watchers are allowed at all polling stations. If candidates don't want to send a poll watcher, that's on them.
"How do you do recount if you do not have
A. a list of voters, who have identified themselves, and
B a corresponding exact number of votes"
The US does have this. In fact, while who you voted for is secret, who voted is public record. We count how many, and who, voted, and can compare that to the number of votes cast.
We do identify who's voting, citizenship is verified at registration, polling places have a list of, not just who's eligible to vote, but who's eligible to vote *at that polling place*.
Candidates are welcome to send observes, but are not required to. Do you really want a candidate to be about to shut down a polling place by pulling their observes?
At each and every voting station? In the third largest country in the world, with the third largest population in the world?
In my state, voting machines print paper ballots that you can physically check and hand over. Dunno about the rest of the country.
Don't know what you mean to suggest with the 'exact number of votes' stuff. Votes are by secret ballot, so there would be discrepancies between number of voters who showed up and votes, period, no matter what (guy comes in, gives name/ID, submits invalid ballot, boom, one more identified voter than vote).
These are just bizarre claims which don't seem to have been checked before being made. The US goes to great lengths to ensure the integrity of its election.
> In the third largest country in the world, with the third largest population in the world?
How is population size relevant here? A large population means more people who could potentially be observers.
> Votes are by secret ballot, so there would be discrepancies between number of voters who showed up and votes, period, no matter what (guy comes in, gives name/ID, submits invalid ballot, boom, one more identified voter than vote).
He's asking for international observers. Also, you avoided admitting that you gave a source whose first major citation is "I made it the fuck up," so I will engage no more than this until you admit as much, you lying hack fuck.
And yet, when you had a discussion about voting for Trump with Richard Hanania, who has been slagging Trump in multiple posts, he expressed his intention to vote for Trump for boutique reasons.
What is the matter with people like Hanania? It's like when al Qaeda attacked us on 911 and the president referred to them as "folks" and then "criminals" when what they were was *soldiers* of a religious military order like the Teutonic knights (i.e. Islamic crusaders) who had *declared war* on us.
Hanania’s brand is being maximally contrarian, that’s how he gets attention and money. It’s entertaining and even intellectually interesting here and there, but he’s so obviously driven by building his brand.
Unserious is maybe harsh, but compared to writers that I respect because they are intelligent and care about ideas, he’s maybe 75% as “serious”, and a good part of the gap comes from the trollishness/contrarianism which constitutes the brand.
I read him because what he writes makes sense and seems reality-based, but then his decision to vote for Trump comes across as unserious wishful thinking. He seems to think most of Trump's rhetoric is just theatre.
I would point out that someone nearly succeeded in killing Trump. That is as real as it gets and certainly not theatre. Trump has been indicted on multiple sets of charges, two of which involve serious charges. He has already been convicted on one set and if he doesn't win the election he faces more convictions with possible jail time. That too is a real thing.
Trump must be rather paranoid by now. As the election approaches, Trump has shown increasingly extreme rhetoric, which is consistent with feelings of persecution. Why shouldn't Trump feel like he is cornered and must destroy those who threaten him lest they destroy him? What really is there to stop Trump from acting on some of his rhetoric?
Hanania seems content to ignore all this and yet has perception into the nature of Trump and his MAGA followers. This is what Benham is scratching his head on.
I think your argument to make the case he "knew" is kind of bs. You need to consider the information set he had at the time. Even if the analysis done at the time of fake ballots were wrong, you have to show that he had good reason to believe those analyses were wrong. I remember for example that overnight spike, which was (I believe) debunked weeks later. But this doesn't matter, at the time he had good reason to suspect fraud.
If you want to be fair you should give a list of criteria you would consider sufficient for overturning elections. (For example if turnout is usually 50% in some state but then it turns to 80%, then that's one reason, but maybe not individually sufficient one). Just make such a list so you can evaluate ex ante and not ex post.
It's possible that he believed for a very short time, but after all the court cases lost, it's hard to think he still lost, especially given the other facts I list.
The court cases occurrd months if not years after January 6th. This is not a good way to analyze the issue ex ante. You are projecting information that was revealed later into the past.
That's like saying that lottery losers are all dumb because it turned out that their ticket number wasn't the winning one. Why didn't they write the winning numbers? They are so dumb!
I am not aware of any evidence that Barr investigated any of these claims at the time. Do you have some kind of reason to believe he investigated the spike?
No. Its because federal and state courts have rules of evidence and rules of procedure, both designed for getting at the truth. None of which were specially adopted for these cases. And they have judges who are trained as lawyers and judges and have a lot of experience, and none of whom were specially appointed for this controversy. And then there are appeals, designed to correct specific types of errors. The process is pretty good, and the set of revealed wrongdoing and exposed malfeasance that have come out in litigation are huge. The process is really good, and when one side is 1 minor win and 62 losses, that's a pretty good indication that there is no there there.
There are preliminary requirements before courts look at evidence, such as a well-plead complaint. My point was general -- the system is pretty good and designed to get at the truth. You didn't dispute that, but claimed -- without support -- that the courts here refused to look at evidence on procedural grounds. If you want to get into specifics, I'm happy to do it. If you want, pick the best case you have of the 62 cases (pick one with an online docket), and lets look a the pleadings and the court orders together. I've been practicing appellate law for over 30 years, and I have some familiarity with reviewing trial court pleadings and orders. And the trial courts sometimes make mistakes. I'm happy to take a careful look and we can do it together, but you pick the case. Until then, you just have an unsupported assertion.
The courts really aren't good at certain things, like dealing with election fraud. Largely because judges would rather not deal with the resulting constitutional mess. Especially not when the left had just been engaging in "fiery but mostly peaceful protests".
Trump claimed 2012 was stolen, that 2016 was stolen, and was claiming well in advance that 2020 was going to be stolen too. He continues to claim 2020 was stolen. He claimed the 2016 primaries were rigged against him. He has claimed that California would vote Trump if Jesus counted the votes. He is either so deeply delusional that he cannot be trusted with power, or indeed to change his own diapers, or a naked, uninhibited liar. (I assume that the possibility of insane levels of delusion is why Bentham gives it a 30% chance that he didn't know he lost.)
Do you think Trump has the same beliefs about 2012 and 2016 as 2020? Its quite clear to me the structure of his claims are different.
Unless you think that he thinks that when he won in 2016, he really lost. I see no reason at all to believe this tbh. So you must conclude that "steal"(i am taking your word here that he has employed this word) has different definitions in different cases.
He said that he won the popular vote and would have won California in 2016 if it weren't for millions of illegals. His claims are delusional. I do not believe that his beliefs about the elections are similar, because I believe he is an inveterate liar.
The overnight spike was predicted long in advance. Below is a link of Bernie Sanders before election night not only predicting this would happen, but also that Trump would abuse it to claim fraud. Everyone knew that mail-in ballots would be counted last and would massively favour Democrats.
Mail in ballots do not predict a spike. Mail in ballots predict a reversing trend, not a spike. Not unless you think that 100% of a 10k people voted Biden
What evidence have you looked at that supports the idea that the states with "overnight 'spikes'" were supposed to be performing continuous tallies rather than bulk updates to the vote count in terms of counties/voting types that were finished at random intervals?
What still puzzles me is how something like 45% of the country's population still supports Trump. This fact calls into question the fundamental basis of democracy, if a substantial portion of the voter base is delusional and/or irrational.
Congrats on arriving at the real takeaway. Mass suffrage democracy was never that good of an idea to begin with.
This is a strange takeaway. If the Electoral College were abolished (ie, if the US moved even more in the direction of "mass suffrage democracy"), Trump never would have been elected in the first place.
On the other hand, if useless people couldn't vote, we probably never end up in this situation either.
"Useless people" have human rights, and that includes voting. I think your real problem is with encouraging mass fervor towards the democratic process. It should be treated like a hobby that anyone can get into, not a religion that we actively try to convert people into.
The idea that questions of governance should be a mere "hobby" is absurd. These are deadly serious matters--matter of crime, punishment, war, life, death, etc. Little bit more important than just something you do for fun on the weekend.
Anyways, no, voting is not a "human right." But if we are going to stipulate that it is, then yes, *in theory* everyone should be super enthusiastic about it--highly rational, highly informed, etc. That is not what happens in practice, but it is most certainly the theory behind mass democracy.
I meant it should be like a hobby in terms of entrance requirements - an activity you should have to opt into rather than be sucked into. If governance is serious, then it should attract people who are serious about it, and engaging with it shouldn't be the default expectation.
Do you have a better system in mind? Democracy certainly has its flaws, but it's much better than dictatorship.
There's plenty of wiggle room between the disaster we have now and outright dictatorship. But if you force it into an all-or- nothing binary choice, don't be surprised when some people make the choice you're afraid of.
By what standard is the modern democracy a disaster? It certainly has flaws, but I would prefer living in modern America to the vast majority of historical societies.
Okay, what system do you have in mind?
If you don't view the current state of things as a train wreck, then our worldviews are probably irreconcilable. Even if I take the viewpoint of this article, though, that would mean we have a guy who unironically attempted a coup, then he got nominated to run for president again anyways 4 years later and now he might actually win the election and return to power. Doesn't seem great!
If you think America and other democracies are a train wreck, wait until you find out about the rest of the world. You may come to the same conclusion as Churchill.
You're probably right about that. In many ways, I am dissatisfied with the state of American politics (and have been for a long time). I think that America has many problems, but calling it a disaster, especially with some historical perspective, strikes me as bizarre and hyperbolic.
Agree that pur present state of affairs is a disaster and that "democracy" is a major reason. But as terrible as Trump is, I think the Democrat agenda is worse.
But would have preferred better candidates on both sides. Real primaries and ranked-choice, instant runoff voting where more than one candidate from each major party can be in the general election would help.
I think a plurality, if not a majority, of the American electorate disagrees at this point. I'm not just talking about the Trump supporters who are very obviously trying to elect him back into office for life... the coup was a feature, not a bug for these people. I'm also talking about leftists such as myself who no longer believe in democracy.
The night Trump was elected in 2016 I decided the best course of action would be for Obama to declare martial law, completely eliminate the Republican party from this country by force, and declare himself global dictator. I've continued to hold this view for 8 years. If anything all of the events which have transpired have only convinced me of this more firmly.
So what would be a superior form of government to democracy? Left wing single party, authoritarian, totalitarian, crush all conservative thought under the boot heel of left-ism forever, for eternity. My guess is most people think that's nuts but it's a deeply held belief of mine.
A common counter-argument is "would you want to live under such a regime controlled by the opposite political party?" The answer is, of course, no. But that really doesn't matter because if that were the case then I, all my friends, and all my family would be dead or exiled... and then we wouldn't have any concerns either.
So I'm either dead or living in a left-wing utopian thought-monoculture... both far superior alternatives to have to suffer the existence of my political enemies.
Anarcho-capitalism. Markets don't suffer from the incentive problems that democracy does because consumers are more rational than voters. This will mean that markets do almost everything better than governments.
I'm mildly sympathetic to that answer, some of the things Huemer and Friedman say in defense of ancapism make sense to me. The main thing that holds me back is Chesterton's fence, I would be much more sympathetic to it if someone could point to a functional ancap society today.
There's also Jason Brennan's epistocracy (though he's ancap he think's it's an improvement on the status quo).
There's also minarchy (which is compatible with democracy but lessens its impact)
Thought exercise: assume only 1 million best qualified people in the nation were granted suffrage and nothing else changed in the system. Criteria was intelligence, empathy, consciousness and interest. 50k best applicants each year get a 20 year term. Would the outcomes of this limited democracy be better or worse than the current system?
My bold claim is that we can incrementally improve on the current system limiting the degree of democracy while remaining democratic.
Ha, ha, ha, who decides who the best voters are? I'm certainly going to think that people whose agenda match my own are the ones meeting your criteria.
I am not sure that I don't want "stupid" people to vote. Who knows whether the "stupid" person sees something that isn't obvious to me?
That said, yes, many people who vote are in my opinion quite misinformed.
I mean, the brilliance of the Venician Republic and the Doge was the consideration in how you pick who to vote. You definitely don't want a monoculture, but you want people who have good judgment. Giving everyone equal vote regardless of interest, capacity seems like an easy system to improve on.
Mencken and Shakespeare also were against mass suffrage, so you're in good company. (Perhaps, a future post: "The Steelman Case Against Democracy" [and the substitute, I guess, would have to be stringent standards for voting or perhaps Mencken's idea of a constiutionally shackled, mostly ceremonial monarchy.])
You are not wrong. Democracy has huge flaws, as lawmakers must base their decisions not on what's best, but on what gains votes.
I mean, it's not a new information that most people are irrational. The 98% meme exists for a reason.
Few people are “irrational” except for maybe demonstrably crazy people (even they often demonstrate rationality). The “irrational” slur is just lazy thinking; it’s akin to a Marxist accusing someone of “false consciousness”. Anyone we disagree with can be labeled “irrational”.
The main problem with the electorate (and people in general) is ignorance, which is the actual threat to democracy. But we don’t really have democracy anyway; we have elected oligarchy. But sometimes the people get a bit uppity and the defenders of democracy (oligarchy) get upset.
No, it is not. All people show demonstrable biases, most people show lack of awareness of said biases and thus of self-correction.
https://open.substack.com/pub/jclester/p/rationality-a-libertarian-viewpoint?r=b5zww&utm_medium=ios
A big pile of falsehoods and low-level language plays.
Jump over there and explain his errors.
Ignorance is a problem, but the main problem would be that people vote based on selfishness or fear or reasons other than simply choosing what's best for the country.
I doubt most people vote based on selfishness as they probably intuitively understand that a single vote doesn’t count.
I think the _degree_ of irrationality is new information, at least to me.
That doesn't surprise me, it is easily explained through the instinctual operation of in-group, prestige and frequency bias in cultural (meme) transmission.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-cultural-evolution-works
What does surprise me is how few of what Hanania calls "elite human capital" (EHC) on the right have done what Benham is doing here, and Michael Huemer has done
https://fakenous.substack.com/p/i-dont-care-about-the-issues
EHC are people for whom individual learning (analysis of the facts) and direct bias (assessing the reliability of the meme transmission one receives as to whether to adopt it) are sufficiently well-developed to override the three instinctual biases mentioned above.
Uh, yes. Historically “democracy” was seen as a degenerate and hedonistic mob state whose net impact was to put the fate of a nation at the whim of people who barely had time to care about how taxes work. That’s why until very recently the few extant democracies limited their voting class to a very small number of elite individuals who were usually educated and had high stakes in the efficiency of government.
I cannot emphasize enough that literally for millennia “Democracy killed Socrates” was the core impression most political thinkers had about democracy.
It calls democracy into question that people would subvert democracy?
You are assuming that most people support Trump because they believe everything he says (and not even that they agree with him trying to do this). This is of course not true.
It was Jefferson who wrote that a well-informed populace is essential to democracy... and Tim Urban's recent book talks about how both the red and blue golems (but particularly the red) in our system are playing anti-democratic games. It won't hold for much longer at this rate.
But, I'd gently correct one bit of your comment. It isn't delusion or irrationality that's driving most people's continued support – its living in an alternate, uninformed reality. Most have no idea about the fake electors scheme. They have no idea how poorly formed the court challenges were. They think there was something there, that some technicalities or elite manipulation prevented the truth from coming out.
They believe that because its what Trump told them.
Democracies can and do fail, and they fail when demagogues realize how easy it is to exploit anger and fear, how easy it is to lie boldly and selfishly, and how much there is to gain by playing games which are incompatible with democracy... its the other side who has to still play by the rules of civil society. So, yes. Democracy has a fatal flaw, history has shown us how it can be exploited, and its being actively exploited by the right this time around. Its why i'm voting for Kamala despite never having voted blue before in my life.
It's not obvious that the stolen election narrative isn't true. As a Republican voter I often comment in conservative spaces that it's BS (I try and correct my own tribe at times) and in the few times I've tried to do a deeper dive on it the claim seems to have no substance. But who knows?
It is annoying that we are headed into another election where not enough has been done to prevent another round of vote fraud claims. The post election season could be very rough in this country no matter who wins.
It isn't obvious, that's fair. it requires a lot of work to arrive at the truth, especially when liars are abundant. Its Brandolini's law: The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
My take is that nothing would be enough. Its too easy to grab six second clips, lie about them on telegram, and let the B.S. get halfway around the world before the truth has gotten its shoes on. No amount of election protections would give people faith if they don't trust any institution at all.
It is perfectly rational to support an attempt to overthrow democracy by your own party. After all, the reason you support your party is that you want it to be in power.
They are perfectly rational, they just don't believe what they say.
I need to make a Bingo card for the replies.
> What about the BLM riots!
> What about the 15 morbillion fake ballots on UPS trucks!
> Only 5 of the 63 court cases were dismissed for lack of evidence! The rest were only dismissed because of standing!!!
> He said that rioters should halt the transfer of power peacefully on Twitter!
> Nancy Pelosi didn’t use her secret powers as speaker of the house and take command of the entire military! Her fault!
Etc etc.
There's a rhetorical move, that shouldn't be done, where someone says "make a bingo card" against common rebuttals, as if making a bingo card does any work whatsoever (it doesn't) in refuting those rebuttals. It's a rhetorical move I find annoying and see too often.
It’s basically a logical fallacy whereby an argument is wrong by virtue of being common. Arguments are often common because they’re compelling!
On the contrary, I use the term “bingo card” because these arguments are continuously recited no matter how many times they are refuted!
Some of those seem to have pretty reasonable readings, though?
Standing vs merits definitely affects how strong evidence you take the court cases to be. (Or are you disputing that whatever amount were dismissed on standing? I'm not familiar with that; I'm just taking your word for it.)
Looking at Trump's speech preceding the capital incursion, he also there indicates that what he wanted was to exert pressure on Republican moderates in a peaceful manner, not to carry out a violent coup.
He did suggest that the national guard should be present.
Are any of these enough to say that his actions surrounding January sixth were not terrible? Certainly not; he should never have done what he did. But I don't see why those are refuted?
>He did suggest that the national guard should be present.
This belongs on the bingo card. Trump suggested the National Guard to show up to protect his protestors. And he is the chief executive - the only person who can deploy the National Guard in DC unless he becomes incapacitated. He decided not to and watched TV for 3 hours and continued to make phone calls with Rudy Giuliani to pressure congressmen into certifying their fradulent electoral votes throughout the riot in the Capitol.
https://www.motherjones.com/2020-elections/2021/01/slow-it-down-giuliani-asked-gop-senator-to-object-to-electoral-votes-from-10-states/
> Standing vs merits definitely affects how strong evidence you take the court cases to be. (Or are you disputing that whatever amount were dismissed on standing? I'm not familiar with that; I'm just taking your word for it.)
"Standing" decisions comes in various favors. Sometimes it can be completely orthogonal to the merits, however standing is oftentimes deeply entwined with the merits. For example, one of the essential components of standing is proof of legal injury, which has to be proven with evidence. If you allege injury, then the merits question is whether that injury is one you can recover from. So many people who claimed election fraus sued, had no evidence of any ballots, and then were tossed out. The courts may not have decided whether those hypothetical ballots were legal, but the decision still defeats claims of fraud.
Furthermore, Candidate Trump would obviously have had standing to contest ballots in any lawsuit if he had evidence that they were cast. The fact that he didn't sign on to most of these suits is strong evidence that they are full of shit.
Finally, there were court cases decided on the merits. I believe the 8th circuit described the evidence presented on the merits as zero.
> Looking at Trump's speech preceding the capital incursion, he also there indicates that what he wanted was to exert pressure on Republican moderates in a peaceful manner, not to carry out a violent coup.
This is simply not what Trump said when he instructed the mob to head down to the capitol, and it certainly does not reflect his actions after he knew what was going on.
Thanks for the education on standing.
>This is simply not what Trump said
Do you have evidence for that?
"I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard."
"Today we will see whether Republicans stand strong…"
"The Democrats are hopeless — they never vote for anything. Not even one vote. But we're going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones because the strong ones don't need any of our help. We're going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country."
Those quotes all look like what I said.
To be clear, when I said "indicates that what he wanted was…not to carry out a violent coup," I did not mean that he said something like "don't carry out a violent coup" (aside, I suppose, from "peacefully and patriotically"). What I was saying was that his speech is, as I said, instructing his people to be pushing the Republican moderates to agree with him, and that what he is pushing for there is clearly something separate from a violent coup.
Sure, and I basically agree that those arguments you’ve listed are bad, but the act of placing them in the bingo card isn’t what’s doing the refuting. Its actual function is that of mockery, more or less.
Well, yes. I was indeed mocking those arguments.
Except they haven't actually been refuted.
Even Mr. MyPillow had to pay out 5 million after his own arbitrators determined he was wrong. Just give it a rest man.
I notice a lack of any refutation in your reply and an implicit appeal to force.
Correct. In fact the reason people put arguments on a bingo card rather than rebut them is because they can't.
You missed Ray Epps using his mind control powers (given by the FBI; he is their most powerful warrior) to force them to break into the Capitol against their will because he said something the previous night.
Oh please. You’re just too cute for words.
Frankly, I don't have a very high opinion of the BLM riots. But this raises the question: Why didn't Trump himself do anything about them?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act
I endorse this entire essay. Recognizing that the bar is EXTREMELY low, what's the "best" substantive defense of the fake elector scheme that you've encountered?
The single most effective argument in support the stolen election meme is the same reason why the vast majority of its adherents actually do believe it. Simply put, the president of the United States, and the twice-nominated leader of the Red political faction said it had been.
Republican elites and media had had plenty opportunity to shut down Trump in 2011 when he started babbling about Obama not being born in Hawaii. Romney could have chosen not seek Trump's endorsement in 2012. The party could have made a deal with the other Republican candidates to all withdraw and endorse Cruz in early 2016 to block Trump, as the Democratic elite did with Sanders in 2020. The fact that they did none of this meant Trump was judged as fit for office, when he was manifestly not, as later events have borne out.
You cannot wait to be sure on these things, that doesn't work. It's like the hundreds of thousands of dead in Ukraine because Biden dithered with Putin.
On that's the second most effective argument. The most effective argument was if one was actually paying attention to what was happening on election night.
https://benthams.substack.com/p/trump-attempted-a-coup/comment/72637343
Ok, the other argument is that fact that the Democrats are constantly fighting tooth and nail to prevent even basic common sense election security measures, like *making sure the voter is who he says he is*.
That’s not right. The charge you make about Democrats is not unique to 2020. People have been pointing that out for a long time. And yet there were not scores of millions of Republicans believing that Bush, Dole, McCain or Romney had actually won. Recall the skewed polls meme in 2012. It was briefly a thing and then vanished, I suspect many people didn’t even know it was a thing.
But the 2020 fraud meme had more legs, and four years later it is a big as ever. Why? Because Trump pushes it
The direction here is clear. The claim is the first step, the driver of the belief. Without it no large-scale belief gets implanted into millions upon millions of Republican brains. The observations you make come after the initial claim, in an effort to find some justification for a pre-existing belief.
> The charge you make about Democrats is not unique to 2020. People have been pointing that out for a long time.
And Democrats have been cheating for a long time.
> And yet there were not scores of millions of Republicans believing that Bush, Dole, McCain or Romney had actually won.
They probably did. Those were, however, at least legitimately close elections. Whereas in 2020 the Dems pulled out all the stops on their fraud.
There is none except ones based on lies and flagrant deceptions. They'll refer to the 1960 Hawaii case, but in 1960 it was done through the courts and they only used the alternate slate after winning there, rather than having them skulking around and telling their electors things like "When you arrive, please state to the guards that you are attending a meeting with either Senator Brandon Beach or Senator Burt Jones and proceed directly to the room. Please, at no point should you mention anything to do with Presidential Electors or speak to media" as occurred with this case. There's a reason that an Arizona false elector has already plead and many are being charged.
(Also, 1960 Hawaii was not outcome determinative, then-VP Nixon was pushing to take away EVs from his party, Nixon asked that it not be used as precedent going forward, and it was unanimously accepted by the joint session, none of which was true of Trump's false electors. Nixon had more character than Trump.)
> There is none except ones based on lies and flagrant deceptions. They'll refer to the 1960 Hawaii case,
How about the 1876 elections.
Sounds like you're just a ignorant of US history as you are of everything else.
Me, trying desperately to justify Trump's attempted coup: "Uhm, you didn't consider the election where they ended Reconstruction by murdering a bunch of black Republicans, though."
So you have nearly no idea what you're talking about, or are you just to dumb to follow analogies?
Analogy? What is the analogy? You're citing the most notoriously corrupt election in American history as evidence that what Trump did was fine. It's prima facie moronic.
If you want me to get into the details of what is different, the the 2020 false electors WERE NOT selected by state governments, whereas in 1876, they were. The state governments do in fact have the authority to send whatever electors they want. We now live in a more democratic era so they generally send electors who vote according to the will of the people of the state.
The 1876 election involved Democrat-led vote suppression efforts of blacks, no?
Yes, the Democrats have been engaging in ballot fraud of various types for most of the country's history. The 2020 election differed only in scale.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/ballot-fraud-is-as-american-as-apple
Yes, the “Democrats are the real racists”! ;) :D
Party ideologies change, especially in their most superficial forms. Party institutional traditions are much more enduring.
The fact that the elections in those states were in fact brazenly stolen.
There's the synchronized stopping of the reported count across multiple states flowed by statistically impossible jumps for Biden, the numerous instances of observers being kicked or tricked out of the counting room followed by the count resuming, in one case the counters literally boarding up the windows of the counting room so observers can't see what the counters are up to, the video recordings of counters feeding the same ballots multiple times through the machines, the multiple eyewitness affidavits, the miscellaneous statistical irregularities, etc.
More generally, how the Democrats are constantly moving heaven and earth to try to prevent even basic common sense anti-fraud measures, like *making sure the voter is who he says he is*.
> These have all been disproven. Also the case in which people were boarding up windows was to prevent Trump protesters from interfering with the counting process which they were attempting to do.
How? By using their telekinetic powers?
Or do you mean that being able to see the counting process would somehow interfere with it, like maybe because their plan for "the counting process" involved doing some funny business that they didn't what seen?
It saddens me that most of my fellow conservative friends, whom I otherwise consider intelligent, have deluded themselves into thinking this isn’t utterly disqualifying.
Refusing to quietly submit to a brazenly fraudulent election is disqualifying?
"But, the Dems stole it fair and square".
Any proof of the "brazenly fraudulent" election ?
Why did the courts reject this allegation?
Because the courts are known for being moral perfect even in the face of leftist "fiery but mostly peaceful protesters".
I asked you for any proof of a "brazenly fraudulent" election.
What evidence convinced you of fraud ?
Sarcastic remarks on the courts morality are an attempt to deflect.
> I asked you for any proof of a "brazenly fraudulent" election.
You didn't, but now that you have:
There's the synchronized stopping of the reported count across multiple states flowed by statistically impossible jumps for Biden, the numerous instances of observers being kicked or tricked out of the counting room followed by the count resuming, in one case the counters literally boarding up the windows of the counting room so observers can't see what the counters are up to, the video recordings of counters feeding the same ballots multiple times through the machines, the multiple eyewitness affidavits, the miscellaneous statistical irregularities, etc.
More generally, how the Democrats are constantly moving heaven and earth to try to prevent even basic common sense anti-fraud measures, like *making sure the voter is who he says he is*.
This is a narrative description of fraud, not a "proof", which i asked since the first comment.
A proof would indicate in which state, in which city, in which section there was a synchronised stop. At which exact time the stop was. What was the vote count before and after the stop. Why a jump was statistically impossible, etc....
Basically a proof is specific evidence that would convince a rational mind, not any unspecified tale.
https://reason.com/2020/12/25/an-autopsy-of-sidney-powells-kraken-reveals-suspiciously-similar-affidavits/
The Sidney Powell affidavits were hilarious. There's a court recording where the judge is yelling at her and her lawyers for not vetting any of the affidavits and not coming prepared with the supposed voter ballot laws they claimed were being violated in the affidavits, but I don't remember the link.
This is all horseshit. If you’re reading this Substack, you should at least attempt to be rational instead of repeating known falsehoods. For example the boarding up the windows thing, those people were not observers, they were protesters disrupting the vote count. The observers were on the inside of those windows with the counters. If your brain wasn’t completely melted away by confirmation bias you would have looked this up at some point in the last four years.
Timely, my most recent post is my long-form reply to this. I think that we can sit here and quibble about whether Trump really attempted a "coup"--after all, some people will argue that what he wanted Mike Pence to do was technically legal/constitutional, and such like. We can also disagree about whether he really "knew he lost" or not, I think you are too uncharitable in your interpretation. I don't think any of this ultimately matters though.
The real question here is just how much we truly value "Our Democracy." This is the implied conflict going on when people argue about whether Trump is really a threat to "Our Democracy" or not. The contempt with which the right views this phrase--"Our Democracy," repeated by liberals as if part of a sacred liturgy--should be informative on this point. The truth of things, if we are capable of being honest, is that we value "Our Democracy" as the status quo so long as it is sufficiently aligned with our interests and preferences.
If we imagine a world in which society had "democratically" decided to enact overwhelmingly conservative preferences--for the sake of example, let's suppose the criminalization of any homosexual relations, also of abortion, a near-total ban on immigration, an end to no-fault divorce, and so forth and so on--then all the liberals who today love to harp on about the value of "Our Democracy" would be singing a different tune. Indeed we already witnessed this in the sharp ferocity with which our rulers turned upon "free speech" the moment they perceived that it no longer sufficiently served their interests.
As for me, I do not support Donald Trump, because I do not trust him to improve the situation (in part because of his actions after the 2020 elections). But I don't pretend to like "Our Democracy" either. Most people who support Trump do so because they hold the status quo in absolute, utter contempt. The notion that he threatens the status quo is therefore a feature in their minds, not a bug. The conservative perception, largely correct in my view, is that the left are honor-free scoundrels who will stop at nothing to win at all costs, and that they constantly get away scot-free with lying, cheating, and all manner of other totally unacceptable, "rule-breaking" sorts of behavior. Thus, to hold Donald Trump in particular contempt by comparison feels absurd.
Great reply and very true. This quote comes to mind: “Democracy has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is a soft variant of communism, and rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else.”
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
There's an incredibly important object-level question here which you failed to address: Is Democracy valuable?
And the obvious answer is: Immensely.
Whether people would abandon a system altogether if it started allowing pedophilia or murder is entirely irrelevant to the question of whether or not the system is useful and good in the first place. Or even if they would abandon it just because the wrong guy won.
Democracy is precious. What you imagine Democrats would do in an imagined hypothetical in your imagination is completely irrelevant to anything. Even if we knew for a fact your imaginings were accurate, it would still be completely irrelevant.
Democracy is incredibly valuable.
>Whether people would abandon a system altogether if it started allowing pedophilia or murder is entirely irrelevant to the question of whether or not the system is useful and good in the first place. Or even if they would abandon it just because the wrong guy won.<
On the face of it, this makes absolutely no sense what so ever. If one system allows murder and the other does not, this fact obviously cuts in favor of the latter system. If this is the only piece of information you have about the two systems, you pick the second one.
"Democracy" is, at least in theory, a vehicle to achieving good governance, i.e. correct policies. The value of "Democracy" thus directly depends on whether it is actually able to enact good policies or not. It is trivial to observe that at some point, if the policies enacted by a particular system are harmful and insane enough, people may begin seeking to change that system. Divorced from policy outcomes, "democracy" has little if any inherent value of its own. Political systems are not religions (or shouldn't be).
I laid this out in the post I referenced at the beginning of the note.
You can use a hammer to kill somebody, you can use a handgun to kill somebody, this does not make them equivalent.
You can use democracy to implement bad policy, you can use dictatorship to implement bad policy. this does not make them equivalent.
The nature of these things are different. Their incentives and uses are different. This significantly impacts their effect on the world. Dictatorships create death and oppression. Democracies create wealth and human rights.
>Divorced from policy outcomes, "democracy" has little if any inherent value
This is like saying if medicine killed people it would be bad- trivially true and totally irrelevant. The actual policy outcomes we observe IN THE REAL WORLD, not philosophical hypotheticals, are the difference between North and South Korea. They're the difference between food on your plate and a gun in your mouth.
Democracy is precious. If you recognize that as the 110% truth that it is, then we agree on everything I care about in this conversation.
Okay, so you understand my point, you just think Democracy always gets everything right, more or less. Your personal view of how much good/bad policy Democracy produces is entirely beside the point. Obviously we are going to disagree on a question like that and our views won't be reconcilable. My point is simply that, if enough bad policy is produced, it becomes an imperative to reform, replace, or otherwise change the current system into something else--just as, if a gun begins to continuously misfire, eventually you will stop using it and get a different weapon.
>The actual policy outcomes we observe IN THE REAL WORLD, not philosophical hypotheticals, are the difference between North and South Korea.<
Worth pointing out that this is a retarded black-or-white fallacy. "The real world" is most certainly not a binary choice between "Our Democracy" or Literally North Korea.
It's the worst system besides all the rest, which are much much worse.
You can suppose that there's a better choice than "our democracy" out there somewhere, but the greatest, most prosperous, most free nations in the world are all democracies. It's more likely you're just wrong.
And it's not just literally every observable metric that point towards democracy beating everything else, there are strong theoretical reasons to believe it's superior too. It aligns incentives to protect citizens from the government, it incentivizes the government to create public goods instead of just paying off an elite class, it maximizes the amount of information in the system.
It doesn't do these perfectly, but every known system is worse at them than democracy.
And it's just morally superior. Governments should be formed with the consent of the governed, not imposed by force.
Usually most critiques of democracy basically come from: "If just this one group was allowed to vote then we'd implement my policy and then everything would be great," but that's just not what happens. The group becomes an aristocracy that the government taxes everyone else to pay off, they implement their policies and it goes horribly, because sometimes other groups have a point and know something you don't, or it accustoms people to being ruled without consent and then we actually do end up in a North Korea situation.
Congrats- you have an idea. I have a history book full of people who had ideas. And a twitter feed. And a reddit feed. And a substack feed.
>You can suppose that there's a better choice than "our democracy" out there somewhere, but the greatest, most prosperous, most free nations in the world are all democracies. It's more likely you're just wrong.<
I can easily speculate that "democracy" is a confounding variable here, if we really want to play this game. Nations like Spain and England were already the world powers of their day while they were still monarchies, well before they made the transition to proper democracies. Peoples of European descent have ruled the world for the past 500 years despite transitioning through a wide variety of different governance structures during those centuries. It is only just now within the past 20 years or so that there has been even the hint of any competition--from China, a nation which is most certainly not democratic in the Western sense. The key variable thus may not be "democracy," but rather simply being white.
Another notable feature of your viewpoint is its absolutism. A single counter-example will invalidate it completely. Several hundred years ago, there was not a single "democracy" (as we conceive of them today) anywhere on Earth--then there was one, and then there were many. Before this emergence, an observer could have scoffed at the notion of replacing monarchy with democracy by appealing to your same logic ("all the best countries that exist now are monarchies!").
The future is uncertain and is not guaranteed to resemble the past. All improvements in governance stem from people who, having reached some level of dissatisfaction with their current arrangement, reach out and attempt to find something better. The governance of the future will almost certainly follow this pattern in the sense that "Our Democracy" will, eventually, be improved upon in some way by people who are fundamentally dissatisfied with its current glaring flaws. I will grant that I don't think Donald Trump is particularly qualified to be the person making those improvements, but my intent here is to illustrate the motivations behind people who support him.
>Usually most critiques of democracy basically come from: "If just this one group was allowed to vote then we'd implement my policy and then everything would be great," but that's just not what happens. The group becomes an aristocracy that the government taxes everyone else to pay off, they implement their policies and it goes horribly, because sometimes other groups have a point and know something you don't, or it accustoms people to being ruled without consent and then we actually do end up in a North Korea situation.<
Completely backwards. "If just this one group was allowed to vote then we'd implement my policy and then everything would be great"--yes, by definition, this would be the case if only Republicans could vote (or only Democrats, if you're a leftist). Your accounting of how this situation progresses is also the inverse of actual US history. The US began with only a very narrow group of people allowed to vote. Rather than this group becoming an entrenched aristocracy, the franchise was extended out again and again, eventually encompassing everyone of any quality whatsoever, with the result that an entire half of the political arena is now predicated largely on simply paying useless people to vote for them in exchange for patronage.
"If we imagine a world in which society had "democratically" decided to enact overwhelmingly conservative preferences--for the sake of example, let's suppose the criminalization of any homosexual relations, also of abortion, a near-total ban on immigration, an end to no-fault divorce, and so forth and so on--then all the liberals who today love to harp on about the value of "Our Democracy" would be singing a different tune. Indeed we already witnessed this in the sharp ferocity with which our rulers turned upon "free speech" the moment they perceived that it no longer sufficiently served their interests."
Well, I mean, I support having the US Supreme Court strike down any bans on child sex dolls/robots that Our Democracy might push through, through either the ballot box or their elected representatives. Does that count for this? I don't want individual rights, especially those deemed vital, to be in the hands of majoritarian mobs!
Sure, that's a great example, because in the eyes of conservatives the left has already weaponized the courts long ago. Roe v Wade and Obergefell are two of the easiest examples of a subverted judiciary being used to bypass our heckin' "democracy." No one really believes in "the will of the people" when it comes to their most sacred values, whether they're left right or anything else.
Yeah, I mean, some of SCOTUS’s most notable decisions were extremely controversial when they were decided, so SCOTUS shouldn’t cuck on the child sex dolls/robots question, at least not in an ideal world. Denying minor-attracted persons that opportunity for a satisfactory harm-free sex life (specifically to those of them who are capable of being permanently satisfied by such dolls/robots) would be extraordinarily cruel.
This is also a major drawback with a cure to aging. For those of us who value social progress, a cure to aging would make social progress much harder since it would ensure the survival of past generations with backwards political views indefinitely. A lot of times, a population’s political views change as a result of generational change, not as a result of people changing their minds.
I almost entirely agree. I think a big factor though is that he has *just* enough plausible deniability in all the well-known individual cases to make a semi-reasonable defense possible. E.g. he told the J6 mob to march "peacefully", or that "find
11,780 votes" can just mean trying to uncover that much genuine fraud, not a call to manufacture votes.
Overall, I think it's beyond reasonable doubt that Trump wanted and tried to stay in power based on mere allegations of fraud, and achieving this would amount to a coup. But this requires evaluating all of his actions as a whole, not because any one singular action passes the reasonable doubt threshold.
I think Republican ambivalence towards this has also been influenced by a certain amount of "crying wolf" about Trump in different areas, and low trust in media and institutions that is not entirely without merit. "Trump attempted a coup? Well, previously it was 'Trump is a Russian agent' and before that 'Trump is the next Hitler'. What's next?" Whereas if this has been 1974 again, where the media were more trusted and political rhetoric less hyperbolic and polarised, Trump's actions would have rightfully seen as far worse than Watergate.
>I almost entirely agree. I think a big factor though is that he has *just* enough plausible deniability in all the well-known individual cases to make a semi-reasonable defense possible. E.g. he told the J6 mob to march "peacefully", or that "find 11,780 votes" can just mean trying to uncover that much genuine fraud, not a call to manufacture votes.
I don't understand why people think Trump's psychology is such a mystery. He was repeating the Georgia ballot box under the table hoax until his speech on Jan 6. This was debunkable by just watching the full video rather than the one Rudy Giuliani spliced. After the Raffensperger phone call, he tweeted out "I spoke to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger yesterday about Fulton County and voter fraud in Georgia. He was unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the ballots under table scam, ballot destruction, out of state voters, dead voters, and more. He has no clue!" when in fact they countered all of his voter fraud claims. He was intentionally maliciously lying about voter fraud the entire time. And saying he told his protestors to peacefully protest the ceritification of the election after calling them out to "take back their country" and hyping up the event on twitter for multiple days and saying the people who refused to walk through the magnetometers with their weapons because they "weren't there for him" is insane.
Relevant work supporting what Matthew just argued - https://youtu.be/k1NUXFfcoDs
When voters aren’t required to show up to vote in person on election day ,when voting is conducted during a once in a lifetime pandemic, allowing for once in a lifetime voting procedures one might expect irregularities to occur.
When the sitting president’s legitimacy and competency are challenged from day one by all of the MSM with an abundance of bogus claims ( Russian hoax) etc. , one may understand the consideration of voter fraud in some circles.
Just saying.
> one may understand the consideration of voter fraud in some circles.
Yes. I understand perfectly the consideration of voter fraud: you are mad your guy didn't win and are fine with lying to pretend otherwise. More than fine - you prefer it! That's why Fox got fucked in the Dominion lawsuit, they were afraid of their viewers leaving to go watch more dishonest news sources if they didn't entertain the dishonest claims of voter fraud, so they ignored all their fact checkers telling them it was bullshit.
>you are mad your guy didn't win and are fine with lying to pretend otherwise
you're psychologizing is factually incorrect. neither Howard nor myself supported Trump in 2020. please stop doing this kind of thing.
This has got to be one of the dumbest election fraud apologisms I've read.
There's no need to do "election fraud apologism." There simply wasn't election fraud. That's why every single time you people have your feet held to the fire and asked to provide any substantive evidence, you can't.
> There simply wasn't election fraud.
Yes, there was.
> That's why every single time you people have your feet held to the fire and asked to provide any substantive evidence, you can't.
You mean aside from the synchronized stopping of the reported count across multiple states flowed by statistically impossible jumps for Biden, the numerous instances of observers being kicked or tricked out of the counting room followed by the count resuming, in one case the counters literally boarding up the windows of the counting room so observers can't see what the counters are up to, the video recordings of counters feeding the same ballots multiple times through the machines, the multiple eyewitness affidavits, the miscellaneous statistical irregularities, etc?
More generally, how the Democrats are constantly moving heaven and earth to try to prevent even basic common sense anti-fraud measures, like *making sure the voter is who he says he is*.
Name a single actual specific case of serious voter fraud. I don't mean some random guy pretending to be his grandpa, I mean serious numbers of votes being distorted. Do not list out ten things. I will then investigate this SINGLE, SPECIFIC case of election fraud, one wherein you provide enough detail for me to corroborate and look into details. If it is ACTUALLY fraud, I will change my opinion. If you do not do this, I will take it as a concession that there was no voter fraud and you're just a lying hack fuck.
> Do not list out ten things. I will then investigate this SINGLE, SPECIFIC case of election fraud,
And then you'll dismiss it as irrelevant because that SINGLE instance wasn't enough to swing the election.
It's not crazy to imagine it could have occurred. But it it had, there would have been massive evidence of it.
And there was.
Or do you have an innocent explanation for the synchronized stopping of the reported count across multiple states flowed by statistically impossible jumps for Biden, the numerous instances of observers being kicked or tricked out of the counting room followed by the count resuming, in one case the counters literally boarding up the windows of the counting room so observers can't see what the counters are up to, the video recordings of counters feeding the same ballots multiple times through the machines, the multiple eyewitness affidavits, the miscellaneous statistical irregularities, etc?
We know Trump filled the zone with shit, but none of it held up in court.
Rather the courts refused to even look at it. I suspect they didn't want to deal with the messy fallout, especially considering the left had just stage "fiery but mostly peaceful protests" in the major cities.
Hey, remember when a couple hours ago, you linked a source containing "evidence" of fraud, and its very first cite for a claim of fraud was "I made it the fuck up"? Did that make you consider even for a single second that you might be wrong?
Just because you couldn't find a document, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
You don't understand.
The election was stolen because it's very clear from credible anecdotes that there was widespread fraud. The evidence did not hold up in court because the entire judicial system is corrupt, just like the DOJ, the media and the FBI.
This is the most simple and logical explanation: Occam's razor and all that jazz.
Oh, this is my favorite cope.
"Trump appointed, Republican judges didn't want to deal with the 'messy fallout' of overturning massive election fraud by democrats."
You can't make this up, folks.
People love to talk about how the importance "having peaceful, universally recognized-as-legitimate transfer of power", and then become indignant that the suggestion that someone would approve a result he knows or highly suspects to be fraudulent in the name of "preserving legitimacy".
The consideration is fine. If people initially trusted Trump and decided to look into the evidence and changed their minds, I would be perfectly happy to respect them. But the total unwillingness to grapple with the facts or have any sense of self-reflection is galling.
I’m not doing any lying. I didn’t vote for Trump.
"Trump repeated the claim that more than 10,000 dead people voted, even after it had been investigated, and the real number was 12."
Just playing devil's advocate here, but shouldn't it be concerning that any dead people voted at all? If 12 cases were able to be definitively proven, couldn't there have been many more cases that weren't detected? Any proveable fraud, no matter how small, makes it seem possible that it occured on a larger scale and just wasn't detected. I would argue that when even miniscule levels of fraud are found, that the burden of proof is to prove the election was actually genuine, not to prove it was fraudulent.
> Any proveable fraud, no matter how small, makes it seem possible that it occured on a larger scale and just wasn't detected.
No? This is the same argument for "we've flipped over less than 5% of the Sahara, therefore there could be a secret highly advanced lost civilization there" or "we've only explored a tiny percentage of the ocean, so Megaladon could still be alive." The fact that a very small number of cases were found is evidence there was not a large number of cases.
If you adopted that standard no election would be valid ever.
> "Trump repeated the claim that more than 10,000 dead people voted, even after it had been investigated, and the real number was 12."
If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.
While who you vote for is secret, who voted is public record. It would be trivial to determine if dead people voted, let alone 10,000. There's no reason to doubt the 12 number.
> It would be trivial to determine if dead people voted
One would think so. It should also be trivial to determine if dead people are on the voter rolls and remove them, and yet whenever people attempt that they get sued by Democratic activists or even the DOJ.
When questioned about this, activists give excuses like "maybe the person in the obituary record is a different person from the person on the voting role who just happens to have the same name", and similar excuses that can be used to create enough reasonable doubt.
Do you think any of the dead people voted for Trump? Or is 100% of the fraud in one direction?
Most of it certainly was.
Why aren't Republicans falsifying so many votes if it's so easy to do it? Even if the corrupt courts ruled in favor of Democrats - which you say they already are doing - why not at least try to win the federal popular vote or something? It's not like they would have anything to lose since the courts are already weaponized against them.
Well, the Democrats have an over century long tradition of machine politics voter fraud.
"Most Republicans seem to agree that what happened on January 6th was a big nothingburger"
Of course they do. They can hardly admit to being in favour of a treasonous attempt to seize power that failed. But they wouldn't have supported him so overwhelmingly since them if they didn't hope he might one day succeed, and forever eliminate the danger of Democrats winning the executive office.
Just as Democrats can't admit to the brazen election fraud that happened in 2020.
If you genuinely believe that, you must have been furious with Trump. The only sitting president in world history so incompetent as to allow the challenger to blatantly steal an election from him. And without either he or any of his officials able to prove it in court. Even in courts whose judge was appointed by his own party. Just how *dumb* you must think he was.
Except, of course, that no Republican thinks Trump was a fool for allowing the challenger to steal the election. Because they don’t genuinely believe Trump allowed the challenger to steal the election.
That’s what makes it clear they don’t seriously believe what they are saying.
True, Trump should have made more of an effort to clean up elections while he had the chance.
However, no one's perfect, and he's still much better than anyone on the Democrat side.
According to the Republican Party, he is also much better than any of the Republican primary contenders even though, according to themselves, he was the only sitting President in world history too incompetent to stop the challenger from stealing the election from him.
As I said, Republican don't actually believe what they are saying.
Some Republicans are so used the Dem's low level ballot fraud that they've developed Stockholm Syndrome.
So you have moved on from declaring that Trump alone was too incompetent a president to stop his own challenger from rigging the ballot, to declaring that all incumbent Republicans are too incompetent to stop their own challenger from rigging the ballot.
As I said, this is how I know you don't believe what you are saying.
I actually think importing millions and giving them the vote is a much worse threat to democracy.
You don't think citizens should be allowed to vote?
I think if it was republicans importing millions of republican voters, you would suddenly understand my point.
I don't think Trump thought he lost. I think he was just egocentric enough and delusional enough to think he won. You can see this, for example, in how he's continued to spend large amounts of money on trying to prevent election fraud in the 2024 election, which is a big waste if you don't think there's fraud going on, and harmful to his own interests.
I still think January 6th was very bad, but everything looks like a less crazy path of action if you're acting under the assumption that there actually was a ton of fraud, that the electoral counts were totally illegitimate, etc. Now, that assumption was false, but I think Trump thought it was true.
Likewise, I'm pretty sure he had his lawyers pushing for him that this was the proper plan to contest the fraud. (And there has been some (probably dubious) precedent of alternate slates of electors in a handful of previous elections.)
Merely saying that people debunked his statements does not prove that he believed their debunkings. People generally have a hard time being convinced of things that they're invested in not being true.
> I don't think Trump thought he lost. I think he was just egocentric enough and delusional enough to think he won.
This is equally, if not more so, disqualifying. If you have a close group of advisers you trust who all tell you the same thing on an issue of fact, to continue to believe the opposite is insanity if you have no other evidence. It's the upholding of dogmatic belief over any rational consideration of fact. That is not a trait a leader should ever exhibit.
> Merely saying that people debunked his statements does not prove that he believed their debunkings. People generally have a hard time being convinced of things that they're invested in not being true.
This is not a workable standard. It invites left-wingers to do precisely the same thing w.r.t mental states i.e claim that they were unconvinced by all contrary evidence and then carry out crimes in service of left-wing ideologies. It would fundamentally render the law weaker and increase the violence we can realistically expect in our lives.
It actually doesn't matter at all whether he knew it was 'true.' He lost. This defense of 'oh, well he is dumb enough and irrational enough to believe it was stolen' is not even a defense. It boggles my mind to see people make it. Just stop. Jesus.
> I don't think Trump thought he lost. I think he was just egocentric enough and delusional enough to think he won.
Because frankly he did.
Bingo, rationalist types often demonstrate (as here) a model of how (other) people believe (even propositional) things that is just not true, but is just subtly enough wrong to not be obvious. It's funny; there are LW posts from The Sequences describing beliefs as more of a network and as motivated by many things, yet when it comes to characterizing Trump (for example), they forget all that, and model him as simply believing-or-not, instead of a much fuzzier thing driven by his narcissism.
Because there is ample evidence he was lying and knew he was lying, it's just that many people commenting on this are low info knuckle draggers that clearly haven't engaged with the issue at all beyond what Matthew wrote in this post.
I don't think the case against Trump is partisan. I agree with this article. I also think that Democrats are doing everything they can to make it seem partisan.
This is especially true regarding the case against Trump in New York. That case is partisan, I hope you'll agree. The Democratic machine throwing their support behind Bragg poisons the well.
Also after the history of the Mueller investigation, which turned out to be a nothing burger, the faith in the system is (justifiably?) eroded among the GOP base.
Then again, I have no doubt the Republicans would also abuse the system against their political opponents if they could, so I guess I can't blame the Democrats too much.
I don’t think Mueller was a nothing burger. I think he found plenty of crooked stuff but he just didn't think it was his place to take it to it’s logical conclusion.
Looking from far away:
it is disturbing that US has unreliable election process
no one sane in Britain, France, Germany , any EU country, and a large number of normal countries in global South is satisfied with the level of election process in US
no observers
no credible paper trail that allows recount
Again, no observers either from opposing candidate or from foreign organizations /states e.g. EU, UN, Russia, India, BRICS.
it is very disturbing to witness almost unanimous efforts by deep state to openly support falsehoods, lies aimed at one candidate
several well known examples like Hunter Biden‘s laptop
it is also disturbing tham mainstream media are unified in supporting one side only, resorting to psychology warfare instead of reporting
Conclusion from a European:
it is possible that significant efforts were invested to manipulate mail votes,
and it is possible that majority for Biden was a result of these efforts.
Can we call it stealing an election ? Yes.
We are now a few weeks before the equally important election, and all the problems that make result look suspicious to honest observer have not been solved.
Nowhere in developed world can a person vote without identifying her/himself.
US is becoming a third world country,
There were observers (e.g. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/11/us-election-international-observers/617017/), there were multiple recounts (e.g. Georgia https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/07/politics/georgia-recount-recertification-biden/index.html). This stuff you are saying is simply not true.
Observers
In civilised countries EACH voting position, has a team of people working on organising election, AND observers from both political parties, guaranteeing that there can be no election fraud.
Recount
How do you do a recount with voting machines?
How do you do recount if you do not have
A. a list of voters, who have identified themselves, and
B a corresponding exact number of votes
US does not have it.
It doesn't mean that elections have been stolen, it means one can never say whether the election has been stolen.
Poll watchers are allowed at all polling stations. If candidates don't want to send a poll watcher, that's on them.
"How do you do recount if you do not have
A. a list of voters, who have identified themselves, and
B a corresponding exact number of votes"
The US does have this. In fact, while who you voted for is secret, who voted is public record. We count how many, and who, voted, and can compare that to the number of votes cast.
Lie, lie, lie.
There can be no recount if you do not identify who is voting
Each voter has to have an ID identification document
that proves he is a legal US citizen
Each voting place has to have a list of all US citizens who have the right to vote in this voting place
Each voting place has to have observers from all political parties
We do identify who's voting, citizenship is verified at registration, polling places have a list of, not just who's eligible to vote, but who's eligible to vote *at that polling place*.
Candidates are welcome to send observes, but are not required to. Do you really want a candidate to be about to shut down a polling place by pulling their observes?
At each and every voting station? In the third largest country in the world, with the third largest population in the world?
In my state, voting machines print paper ballots that you can physically check and hand over. Dunno about the rest of the country.
Don't know what you mean to suggest with the 'exact number of votes' stuff. Votes are by secret ballot, so there would be discrepancies between number of voters who showed up and votes, period, no matter what (guy comes in, gives name/ID, submits invalid ballot, boom, one more identified voter than vote).
These are just bizarre claims which don't seem to have been checked before being made. The US goes to great lengths to ensure the integrity of its election.
> In the third largest country in the world, with the third largest population in the world?
How is population size relevant here? A large population means more people who could potentially be observers.
> Votes are by secret ballot, so there would be discrepancies between number of voters who showed up and votes, period, no matter what (guy comes in, gives name/ID, submits invalid ballot, boom, one more identified voter than vote).
1) So also report the number of spoiled ballots.
2) In the US you don't have to give ID.
He's asking for international observers. Also, you avoided admitting that you gave a source whose first major citation is "I made it the fuck up," so I will engage no more than this until you admit as much, you lying hack fuck.
For the last time, you not being able to find something is not the same as "made up".
Yes, I realize as a narcissist this is probably a novel concept for you.
We do count the number of spoiled ballots. In fact, we count the number of ballots made, the number used, and the number unused.
Gavin,
you just cannot do that without identification
And yet, when you had a discussion about voting for Trump with Richard Hanania, who has been slagging Trump in multiple posts, he expressed his intention to vote for Trump for boutique reasons.
What is the matter with people like Hanania? It's like when al Qaeda attacked us on 911 and the president referred to them as "folks" and then "criminals" when what they were was *soldiers* of a religious military order like the Teutonic knights (i.e. Islamic crusaders) who had *declared war* on us.
Hanania’s brand is being maximally contrarian, that’s how he gets attention and money. It’s entertaining and even intellectually interesting here and there, but he’s so obviously driven by building his brand.
So he is an unserious person?
Unserious is maybe harsh, but compared to writers that I respect because they are intelligent and care about ideas, he’s maybe 75% as “serious”, and a good part of the gap comes from the trollishness/contrarianism which constitutes the brand.
What do you think?
I read him because what he writes makes sense and seems reality-based, but then his decision to vote for Trump comes across as unserious wishful thinking. He seems to think most of Trump's rhetoric is just theatre.
I would point out that someone nearly succeeded in killing Trump. That is as real as it gets and certainly not theatre. Trump has been indicted on multiple sets of charges, two of which involve serious charges. He has already been convicted on one set and if he doesn't win the election he faces more convictions with possible jail time. That too is a real thing.
Trump must be rather paranoid by now. As the election approaches, Trump has shown increasingly extreme rhetoric, which is consistent with feelings of persecution. Why shouldn't Trump feel like he is cornered and must destroy those who threaten him lest they destroy him? What really is there to stop Trump from acting on some of his rhetoric?
Hanania seems content to ignore all this and yet has perception into the nature of Trump and his MAGA followers. This is what Benham is scratching his head on.
I think your argument to make the case he "knew" is kind of bs. You need to consider the information set he had at the time. Even if the analysis done at the time of fake ballots were wrong, you have to show that he had good reason to believe those analyses were wrong. I remember for example that overnight spike, which was (I believe) debunked weeks later. But this doesn't matter, at the time he had good reason to suspect fraud.
If you want to be fair you should give a list of criteria you would consider sufficient for overturning elections. (For example if turnout is usually 50% in some state but then it turns to 80%, then that's one reason, but maybe not individually sufficient one). Just make such a list so you can evaluate ex ante and not ex post.
It's possible that he believed for a very short time, but after all the court cases lost, it's hard to think he still lost, especially given the other facts I list.
The court cases occurrd months if not years after January 6th. This is not a good way to analyze the issue ex ante. You are projecting information that was revealed later into the past.
But all the investigations turned up nothing.
That's like saying that lottery losers are all dumb because it turned out that their ticket number wasn't the winning one. Why didn't they write the winning numbers? They are so dumb!
No, the investigations had already been done by e.g. Barr.
I am not aware of any evidence that Barr investigated any of these claims at the time. Do you have some kind of reason to believe he investigated the spike?
Right because US courts are know for the omniscience and moral perfection.
No. Its because federal and state courts have rules of evidence and rules of procedure, both designed for getting at the truth. None of which were specially adopted for these cases. And they have judges who are trained as lawyers and judges and have a lot of experience, and none of whom were specially appointed for this controversy. And then there are appeals, designed to correct specific types of errors. The process is pretty good, and the set of revealed wrongdoing and exposed malfeasance that have come out in litigation are huge. The process is really good, and when one side is 1 minor win and 62 losses, that's a pretty good indication that there is no there there.
> No. Its because federal and state courts have rules of evidence and rules of procedure, both designed for getting at the truth.
And they sometime fail at there objective, like here where they wouldn't even look at the evidence on procedural grounds.
There are preliminary requirements before courts look at evidence, such as a well-plead complaint. My point was general -- the system is pretty good and designed to get at the truth. You didn't dispute that, but claimed -- without support -- that the courts here refused to look at evidence on procedural grounds. If you want to get into specifics, I'm happy to do it. If you want, pick the best case you have of the 62 cases (pick one with an online docket), and lets look a the pleadings and the court orders together. I've been practicing appellate law for over 30 years, and I have some familiarity with reviewing trial court pleadings and orders. And the trial courts sometimes make mistakes. I'm happy to take a careful look and we can do it together, but you pick the case. Until then, you just have an unsupported assertion.
The courts really aren't good at certain things, like dealing with election fraud. Largely because judges would rather not deal with the resulting constitutional mess. Especially not when the left had just been engaging in "fiery but mostly peaceful protests".
Trump claimed 2012 was stolen, that 2016 was stolen, and was claiming well in advance that 2020 was going to be stolen too. He continues to claim 2020 was stolen. He claimed the 2016 primaries were rigged against him. He has claimed that California would vote Trump if Jesus counted the votes. He is either so deeply delusional that he cannot be trusted with power, or indeed to change his own diapers, or a naked, uninhibited liar. (I assume that the possibility of insane levels of delusion is why Bentham gives it a 30% chance that he didn't know he lost.)
Do you think Trump has the same beliefs about 2012 and 2016 as 2020? Its quite clear to me the structure of his claims are different.
Unless you think that he thinks that when he won in 2016, he really lost. I see no reason at all to believe this tbh. So you must conclude that "steal"(i am taking your word here that he has employed this word) has different definitions in different cases.
He said that he won the popular vote and would have won California in 2016 if it weren't for millions of illegals. His claims are delusional. I do not believe that his beliefs about the elections are similar, because I believe he is an inveterate liar.
The overnight spike was predicted long in advance. Below is a link of Bernie Sanders before election night not only predicting this would happen, but also that Trump would abuse it to claim fraud. Everyone knew that mail-in ballots would be counted last and would massively favour Democrats.
https://youtu.be/-LIb7xNL9Sc?si=NrfvZ--Qvl4wxjKP
Mail in ballots do not predict a spike. Mail in ballots predict a reversing trend, not a spike. Not unless you think that 100% of a 10k people voted Biden
What evidence have you looked at that supports the idea that the states with "overnight 'spikes'" were supposed to be performing continuous tallies rather than bulk updates to the vote count in terms of counties/voting types that were finished at random intervals?
But, the Dems knew how they were going to steal the election in advance.