The Big Wait

The waiting is always the hardest part.

It is the season of waiting on the Christian calendar. Advent. Even for non-believers who celebrate a more culture-current Christmas, this is a time of waiting for the big day. A day into which people pour a lot of effort, hoping to make that one day a glorious respite, an oasis of joy interrupting the day-after-day routine.

And then, this year, we are all waiting for the vaccine, waiting for lockdowns to end, waiting for a new president, waiting for a chance to visit family, waiting for faces to blossom into view again on the streets, at the grocery store, on buses. 

I don't recall another time when the entire nation seemed to be coping with a bad case of delayed gratification, from the commander-in-chief on down. 

Some of us aren't handling it well. Some of us aren't really used to delayed gratification, the president being a case in point. He has been getting what he wants for most of his adult life, and even when things didn't work out for him in the past, he was always able to move the goal posts and come away with a score after all (or at least appear to).

That's not happening this time, and according to numerous reports it's making him crazy (for examples, this and this). They say that he's distancing himself from his more rational and cautious advisors, surrounding himself instead with the crazy ones. What this means is that every prominent Republican, whether senators, congresspersons, or staffers, will have to make the choice: which group do you want to belong to? The Rationals or the Crazies?

According to virtually everybody, Trump's orchestrated plan to contest the Congressional ratification of the Electoral College results, which is set to take place on January 6, is doomed to fail. But that, of course, is missing the point. Success and failure for Donald Trump have always been largely a matter of appearances. "Appearances" is what January 6 is all about.

One of the reasons I think that Trump is going to run for president again, either he or a hand-picked successor, is that he seems to be setting things up in such a way that in the end he will have subjected every Republican to a kind of loyalty test. He will know by the vote on January 6 who is really for him, a loyal minion, and who is not. In other words, he's once again separating the Rationals and the Crazies.

And speaking of the church calendar, January 6 is also Epiphany, which is the 12th day of Christmas and the day associated with the visit of the Magi, bringing their gifts to the Christ child. All eyes will be on Congress that day, but we would be wise to turn and look to Bethlehem as well. In that place, at as specific moment in time, the day-after-day routine was rent asunder by the coming of a child. 

Strange Days

 We're certainly living in strange times. People move from one delusion to another as the one wears out or becomes boring and the new one, promising to explain absolutely everything, comes into view. Not long ago a lot of the president's supporters, and the president himself, were saying that the Covid pandemic was a hoax. Now I've been told by one avid Trumplican that the virus was released into the population by the Dems in a plot to get Biden elected. 

I mention this in passing as a sign of the times. Here's another: the mayor of Kansas City is resigning because of death threats. In fact, the making of death threats seems to have become an American pastime. Then there's the ex-general, fresh from jail after a presidential pardon, calling for marshal law to be imposed by the president in the interest of overthrowing the recent election. And then again there are the various lesser-known talk-radio hacks calling for their listeners to be willing to die for the cause of Trump.

None of this is normal. None if it is excusable. There is no whataboutism to be called into action here. Because some of this talk is coming from so-called leaders. A candidate for governor or a state senator endorsing secession here, a radio-talker with an audience of millions calling for insurrection there. What we are seeing come to pass before our very eyes is an insurrectionary subculture where rhetorical justifications of violence have become the norm, the baseline, and are even considered inspiringly patriotic. 

This subculture will not go away when Trump leaves office. The crazy cannot be put back in the bottle. It has its own media to breathe resentment and grievance-claims into the atmosphere every minute of every day, and it has its hero, its warrior-knight, Donald Trump, who needs that subculture even more than the subculture needs him. 

I don't generally make predictions, but I just don't expect anything good to come from this. Oh, there is always the chance, of course, that there is simply less here than meets the eye. That this blusterer at the Jericho march and his ilk will strut the media stage for their fleeting moment, and then fade away as the audience moves on to the next freak show. But be it noted that the MC of the Jericho March, the noted Christian author Eric Metaxas, afterward described that bluster as "keepin' it real." Thus a call to violent insurrection is casually normalized by a Christian "thought leader." Strange days indeed.

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Read also:

Rod Dreher on the Jericho March

Procedure is getting up through--for now (Kevin Williamson at NR)

Is it over now? Is it really over? By God, I think it's over!

 It's the morning after the Supreme Court slapped down the Texas suit against 4 other states, seeking to overturn their elections. It was the "Hail Mary pass" of all lawsuits, and it fell harmlessly to the ground after being batted around and bobbled in the end zone for a second or two. Now it seems like a good time to take stock.

First, the system held. Democracy survived. The crazies lost. Upon this score there is much that might be said, but I'll leave it at that for now.

Second, shame on the Republican Party. Speaking as someone who for many years was of your tribe, I am saddened by your fall. Your conscience has been seared, it seems, by your lust for power. Some of you seem like you'll stop at nothing. I once thought you were a home to people with a conservative frame of mind, but it turns out you are only a home to grifters, fantasists, and gamers of the system. I have very little hope for you. But it's still a little shocking to see how easy it was for Donald Trump to steal your soul.

And third, the Christians. I am not speaking of all, or even nearly all. I am speaking here of a vocal minority. These are not simply Christians who happen to prefer Trump to Biden, but who for the past year have bought into Qanon conspiracy theories, passed along every rumor that made Biden look bad, eagerly dealt in lies, and who recently have actively supported the overriding of the election results for purely political motives. These folk are often Charismatic Christians who think it gives their politics a sheen of spiritual respectability to have leaders like Eric Metaxas, Michael Flynn, and "prophetic" nutcases like Lance Wallnau (look him up, if you dare). All this represents something like the captivity of the church. It needs to be repented of. It is sheer poison.

Read also:

Time to Step Back from the Brink

Whither Trumpism?

The Loser's Last Grift

 Joe Biden's margin of victory in the popular vote has just surpassed 7,000,000. In terms of percentage, he received 51.3% of the vote, while Donald Trump received 46.9%. This margin ranks as the 2nd-widest in the six elections since 2000, behind Barrack Obama's 2008 victory.

The president and his allies continue to attempt to undermine these results with a fusillade of legal challenges that ultimately go nowhere, undermined by their glaring lack of evidence. The number of cases they have now lost is up in the 40s, by last count, but I think Trump's lawyers consider themselves quite successful. They mean by this onslaught to produce widespread distrust in the electoral process and thus in the Biden presidency itself. And it seems they're hitting all their marks.

As such, this hubbub of Twittered accusations, bizarre press conferences, conspiracy theories, and seemingly incompetent legal challenges all amounts to an opening gambit in what appears to be a long-term strategy. Upon the basis of all this the outgoing president will build his next grift. Word is that he has already raised more than 200-million smackers since the election, proving once again that in America "the rich get richer."

He'll lose much of his case for needing that money once these court challenges are all dispensed with, but in the meantime he's milking the cash-cow for all it's worth. This will help pay for the real lawyers he will need after this is all over, and I doubt that Rudy Giuliani will be one of them. He'll need really effective advocates at that point, not clowns.

So here we all are, waiting. The outgoing president is making rhetorical war on American democracy, and I suspect that the majority of people in America just want the grifter out of their headspace. The system seems to be holding up, despite calls from Trump's allies that he institute some sort of marshal law and hold another election, with military tribunals to punish the supposed malefactors of the last one. Nothing in my lifetime has been more unAmerican, more thoroughly unpatriotic, than this campaign of the president and his allies. And nothing more disconnected from reality. 

Then Came Rudy! Or, The Madness of King Donald (a play in too many acts)

 Joe Biden's lead in the popular vote is now more than 6 million. That's more than twice Hillary Clinton's margin. 

The president, through his lawyers, is attempting to delegitimize the vote-counting process in the mind's of his loyal supporters. Indeed, he may have largely accomplished this. His hope that state legislators in key states will somehow nullify their electoral results and appoint pro-Trump Electors seems like a Hail Mary of historic proportions. I think it is more a matter of showmanship, pandering to the yokels, proving himself a "fighter," than actual strategy.

In the early stages of this effort there was a marked difference between what his lawyers were contending in court and what the Mad, Mad World of the pro-Trump Internet was spewing forth. In the latter case, the fantastical conspiracy theories, unhinged from logic and the rules of evidence, were flung about like digital confetti, supported by You Tube videos where some guy took a screenshot of his TV on election night and yelled, "See! Proof! It's all a SCAM!"

But after some of Trump's more circumspect legal teams dropped out of the case, understandably worried that losing one's credibility in a very public way is probably not a winning business plan, then came Rudy! And things have careened downward into insanity ever since.

The Great Election Steal of 2020 is, it has been said, the new Birtherism (another big lie that Trump was instrumental in spreading). It is also, I suspect, this generation's parallel to the myriad conspiracy theories surrounding the JFK assassination. The theories then didn't have to make sense, they didn't have to be backed by evidence, and they could often be substantially contradictory, but people believed them all. You were considered naive if you brought reason to that conversation. It was not one big lie then, but a seething Petri dish of lies, a whole cottage industry of book-hawking rumor-mongers. This is what we're in for these next few years.

Remember when it was Russians trying to undermine confidence in the electoral system? Those were the days. I think what we're seeing now, with the defeated incumbent trying to undermine the system, is the absolute lowest act of a very low president. When Never Trumpers like myself warned that "character matters," this is what we were talking about. The playing out, on the world stage, of one man's utter disregard for anything but what he perceives to be his own self-interest (and even there his perception is strangely out-of-whack). Indeed, he is a man bent away from true in a way that seems remarkably destructive. The nation means nothing to him when set against his own self-image, his brand, which means everything to him, and which justifies everything.

I think that justice will prevail and Biden will take office on January 20, but I'm guessing that the madness of King Donald will continue to play out on the media stage, before our eyes, for years to come, and it will not end well for him.

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Read also:

The United States is Buckling

Trump's Disgraceful Gambit

President Trump's One (half-hearted) Virtue

President Trump has floated the idea of drawing down our troop-strength in Afghanistan by 2500. In response, Defense department types, people with stars on their shoulders, and politicos of every stripe, all declared the world was coming to an end! It seems that those 2500 troops are all that prevents the Taliban from taking over the country again.

Apparently, no one in Washington wants to "bring the boys/girls home" except Donald Trump. Back when he was running for president in 2016 he talked of doing this, and I recall thinking, well now that's the only sensible thing the man has said! I also remember thinking, I'll believe it when I see it.

Well it turns out that Donald Trump is the slowest and most reluctant occupation-ender that has ever resided at the Big House in Washington. In fact, as recently as October he was promising that all troops in Afghanistan would be home by Christmas. Ah, the old "Home by Christmas" chestnut. 

And proving that people really can learn from history, absolutely no one believed him.

Still, the removal of 2500 troops from Afghanistan must really be a dreadful prospect, because all the Dems turn out to be against it. President-elect Biden promises to maintain some sort of modest military presence there for, apparently, ever! Think-tank gurus and revolving-door Defense Specialists (there are so many of these folk!) one and all have their hair on fire, right on cue.

Dare I say it? Joe Biden is going to be a business as usual president. He may surprise me, but I'll believe it when I see it.

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Read also:

Barbara Boland on 'Decapitations' at the DOD

Andrew Bacevich on How War Became Absurd -- Again

Trump as Victim will be Good for his Bottom Line

 As of this morning, Joe Biden's lead over Donald Trump in the election returns stands at 5.5 million votes, a 3.7% margin of victory. That margin closely resembles the Obama victory of 2012.

Although virtually all of Trump's court challenges to these results have failed, and his challenge in Pennsylvania appears doomed, the outgoing president still insists that the election was "RIGGED." The president is simply maintaining a counter-narrative for his followers to cling to, and around which he can promote his next endeavor (whether a media project or another run at the presidency).

Meanwhile, the worsening Covid pandemic seems to cry out for leadership, but the president seems to lack interest in anything now but promoting his narrative. The only truly "presidential" behavior we're seeing is coming from the President Elect, Joe Biden. 

President Trump's legal maneuvering continues to fall flat. He's withdrawn claims in Arisona and in Pennsylvania. It seems that the thin reed to which MAGA-land is clinging grows thinner by the day. There will come a point, when the court cases have all failed and the elections have been certified in each and every state, when it will be no use pretending any longer.

I don't expect Trump to actually concede at that point (and it doesn't matter anyway), but I expect him to set up as the leader of a the MAGA-Resistance, a kind of president-in-exile. There will be rallies to hold, merchandise to sell, and a myth to propound endlessly. One can go a long way and even make a lot of cash in today's America by riding the myth of victimhood. Here, strangely, the Left and Right converge.

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Read also:

The Evangelical Reckoning Begins

The Cultural Consequences of Very, Very Republican Christianity

Odds (by Alan Jacobs)

On the Use (and misuse) of Skepticism

 As legit law firms drop out of Trump's legal team, Trump decides to put Rudy Giuliani in charge. This is more or less an admission that the actual court cases are hopeless and now the whole effort is about bluster, which is how Trump maintains his following. Who better, then, than the 2nd greatest blusterer on the American scene, Rudy Giuliani?

But the whole purpose now is not to somehow stay in office, but to leave office with his 48% believing he'd actually won. Here's a prediction: soon after the inauguration of Joe Biden, Trump will announce his candidacy for the 2024 nomination. This is a low-cost way for him to begin taking in huge amounts of money, paying off the debts of his last campaign, and operating as a kind of shadow-president, blasting away at Biden for the next 4 years.

Just a prediction. Maybe it won't happen quite that way, but if it does, that will surely make things difficult for any alternative Republican candidacy. If anyone was hoping for some sort of battle for the soul of the Republican Party, that hope is probably in vain. 

No one can predict the future, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if things played out this way. It's also what Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo believes: Trump Shifts Gears.

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If I learned anything about politics from my parents, it was that I should always be very skeptical about what politicians say. All politicians. Both parties. Period.

Over the years I have had occasion to be less skeptical about certain politicians than others, and I have come to think that blanket skepticism is no more rational than blanket acceptance. So then I am not quite as uniformly sketpical as my parents were, but still pretty damn close!

Many of Trump's supporters will admit, on occasion, that their man is a great liar. And yet they are never actually skeptical of what he says. If they can find some weird alt-news website that echoes the lie, they consider that verification enough, and the lie becomes a kind of holy writ among them.

Though their skepticism of all others remains in tact, nothing is left of it where Trump is concerned. He exists in a realm above ordinary considerations of empiricism, rationality, logic, or even any values that rest on the ascertaining of truth. And that magic realm is theirs as well.

This is starting to sound like a mass psychosis, and perhaps it is. You might think that people, once lied to, might become more skeptical about whatever comes from the mouth of the liar. That would be a kind of wisdom, right? But this is not happening. The denizen of Trump World does not become more skeptical after all the lies, but in fact merely transfers his skepticism to everything else, but toward the serial liar he remains an awe-struck true-believer. He is only skeptical of whatever does not comport with the lies of the great man. The rest is all Swamp, Fake News, shadowy elites behind the scenes, and only their man, the true hero, remains untouched by the taint. 

I think that the need for a true perception of reality is baked into humankind from the beginning, but also baked-in is the need for story, for drama, and for heroic myths. It behooved our forebears to know whether that rustle in the tall grass was just the wind, or a crouching tiger, but also to sing songs about the hero who fought the tiger and won. 

Maturity, perhaps, is to know when to enjoy the story, and when to come back to reality. What we have now is a nation of people for whom that ability has deteriorated. This makes us open to lies, prone to be taken advantage of by con artists and power-grabbers. What we need is not an alternate hero, but a return to our right mind.

In which I compare the President to a beached whale . . . but a beached whale has more dignity

 Now the electoral map is complete, and Joe Biden has 306 Electoral College votes, almost exactly the total that Donald Trump won in 2016. Biden's share of the popular vote has inched up to 50.9%, with a lead of 5.4 million votes.

Trump's legal challenges failed on several fronts yesterday. The system, it seems, is rattling toward resolution. It's not pretty, but it's working. So now some of the president's staunchest supporters are turning to the nuclear option. This is advocated not on the grounds that the election was rigged in favor of Biden (a contention that is nakedly false), but on the grounds that Biden would make a bad president. It would quite simply be the overriding of the popular will by 4 state legislatures. 

Plus, it would be illegal. [And see also, it's completely insane.]

Meanwhile, the president's lawyer's, with their reputations to protect, are dropping out of the charade. The president, I believe, is working on his exit strategy, and all this attempted litigation is just buying him time, putting off the inevitable.

But I think that Trump can only try the patience of the 52.7% of the population that voted against him for so long. He wants to exit while still claiming victory, claiming the whole thing was a sham and he was robbed, but he's looking more and more like a helplessly beached whale. He may have missed his moment. I think that even some of his true-believers will begin to shrug and say, let's just move on. Not that they'd give up the fight, or quit believing the BS, but sometimes the conditions on the ground call for a tactical retreat.

I myself am beginning to think more and more about what a Biden presidency will be like. I don't expect to love it, but this election outcome may be about as favorable (by my lights) as any in my lifetime. That is, a Biden win (the crazy man in the White House is soundly rejected), but the Republicans hold the Senate and gain ground in the House (forming a check on the more extreme proposals coming out of the Democratic Party left). For a moderate-conservative like me, it's the best I could have hoped for!

[See also: A Moderate's Manifesto, by Ronald Dworkin]

Joe Biden has latched on the word "unity," but I think that's entirely the wrong word. There will never be unity between the factions that vie for power in the American system, and in fact there shouldn't be. But there can be (on occasion) cooperation, which requires compromise. That is not "unity," which is a sort of anti-political and somewhat Utopian mantra, but politics (something Biden has spent his career practicing, even with a certain aplomb, so now is not the time to spurn the real work before him in favor of airy fantasies).

* * *

Like Donald Trump, I keep wondering how I'm going to make the coming transition. For Donald, it's the transition to private citizen, while for me it's the transition of this blog away from these daily musings about the election. I've got to quit sometime! I mean, it was never my intention to be a political blogger. 

So then, I'm going to trend away from all this, although I still want to talk political philosophy generally, which has taken on a deeper interest for me. I'll also be going back to my old theme of musing through Bible passages. I hope my readership (we're talking a number well up into the single digits here) will stay with me.

As for my musing through this damned election, you can find them all here.

Grievance Culture, All the Way Down

Joe Biden's lead in the national vote-count is now 5.3 million. Arizona is now blue on the NYTimes Interactive map, giving Biden at least 290 Electoral College votes. This means that even in the highly unlikely event that the lawsuits in Pennsylvania, say, were successful in reversing the results in that state, Trump would still need to pull off the same trick in 2 other states as well in order to shift the Electoral College to his favor.

North Carolina remains, inexplicably, undeclared (it's a clear winner for Trump) and Georgia, where Biden has a 14-thousand vote lead, is in the midst of a hand recount.

But many millions of others believe the election has been stolen. They assume the allegations of the Trump team are all true, and it was Donald who won this election. The Balkanization of this nation continues apace. 

This is a situation quite unlike anything we have experienced. It's a good bet that a sizable majority of our country do not believe in the validity of this election (even despite Trump's own Department of Homeland Security calling it the most secure election in history).

It is in Trump's interests to maintain this culture of grievance. In fact, to understand the genius of Trump, one must understand that he is a master of grievance-maintenance within a significant American subculture. 

The idea of a culture of grievance or of victimhood has long been a critique that the Right has launched against the Left, but it was Trump's special sauce to nurse into being his own special brand of grievance culture, making the election one that pits differing claims to victimhood against one another.

This issue is wrapped up with race and class issues, of course, and it is wrapped up also with Trump's tactic of gaslighting.

When the Democratic Party had the sole proprietorship of grievance culture in America, I was not a fan. When the Republicans under Trump became simply a competing brand of the same, well, it doubled my ire. We are seeing the result now. Trump-world is nothing but grievance, mostly bogus, all the way down. Grievance-culture requires constant feeding, and Trump is willing and eager to sustain it forever, because without it his brand completely collapses.

This is why something like Sharpiegate could cause these people to take to the streets in protest. It was a complete hoax, but it was created for the one and only purpose of feeding and sustaining Trump-worlds sense of grievance.

* * *

Read also:

Another amusing tale of a Trump Litigation snafu

The Big Sulk

 President-elect Joe Biden's lead is now at 5.2 million. 

Arizona's Republican AG says there is now no chance that Trump can close Biden's 12-thousand vote lead in that state. He has also said there has been no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

His Republican counterpart in Georgia, where they are going to a hand-recount, and where Biden leads by about 14-thousand votes, says much the same thing. Recounts, by the way, seldom result in more than a very marginal adjustment in vote-totals. The largest ever recount adjustment amounted to just 1,100 votes.

Karl Rove, no friend of the Democrats, wrote a piece for the WSJ saying there was no evidence of widespread fraud and that the president ought to cooperate now with the transition process.

Robert Jeffress, Texas mega-pastor and Trump ally, admits that it's clear that Biden has won. 

In the meantime, Donald sulks in the White House. He tweets that the pre-election polls were wrong on purpose and at least one, he said, was probably illegal. An illegal poll. You can't make this stuff up.

But strangely, though he runs the Justice Department, no "illegal-poll charges" have been brought, probably because there is no law against polling. The charge is, how shall we say this, stupid-nuts.

Most Republicans are, however, defending Trump's unusual behavior or at least remaining silent about it. 

My own Trump-supporting friends are passing on videos from known Fake News sources like Gateway Pundit that allege widespread fraud or even election-rigging. They say Trump won the election and even insist he will remain in office. They seem to have an allergic reaction to facts, or to have adopted vision-conscripting blinders so they can see only what suits them and filter out the challenging and inconvenient. It's as if they are suffering from some sort of mass psychosis, and I honestly fear what will happen when all the legal battles fall through and the elections are upheld in the courts.

Most of these friends are professing Christians of the Charismatic variety. They have a tendency to go all in on prophecies that suit their political pre-sets. These "prophets" (yes, those are scare-quotes) have said for years that Trump is God's man and will win re-election to continue God's work. These Charismatic Trump-followers have seen this election from the start not as a political event but as a kind of end-times mega-battle between good and evil. 

Such a battle will never be lost by the forces of God (so they style themselves). The election was not merely an exercise in democracy, it is God vs. Satan. [Yes, they are this crazy.]

And so we move on. 

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See also:

President Trump's Last Hissy Fit, by S. E. Cupp

4,924,464

 At this moment Biden's popular vote lead over Trump stands at 4,924,464.

The Electoral College is, of course, where the action is, but it is interesting to see the president and his legal crew trying their best to overturn a 5-million vote plurality. This is a margin larger than Obama's in 2012. The race was very close in some states, but nationally not particularly close. It should rank about the 14th narrowest margin of victory in history (Garfield and Kennedy are the two closest ever in the popular vote). 

So far, Trumps  legal maneuvering has come to naught. Perhaps this is just the new way of American elections: the adjudication stage. 

Arizona and Georgia appear destined to go with Biden in the end. Trump has been closing the gap in Arizona, but appears to be running out of time. He would have to win 60% of the remaining ballots to pull even. Of course these states (and others) are destined for recounts, but normally recounts don't result in drastically different results (maybe a change of a few hundred at worst).

The other simple fact to keep in mind that most of the complaints lodged by the Trump lawyers are not only lacking evidence, but they don't account for enough votes to reverse the results in any state. In other words, even if they were all successful (and they won't be), they wouldn't change the results. All they amount to is sand in the gears.

I would suggest that the way has been prepared for this moment by 4 years of this administration working hard to undermine the belief in truth itself. All truth, for them, is simply political truth, an artifact of political gamesmanship. The truth that belongs to the Democrats is a construct, bolstered by the MSM, that one may dismiss out of hand. The truth that belongs to Republicans is trustworthy, and needn't be bolstered by anything. Evidence is not necessary and critical thinking is a tool of the elites.

This is a point of view that seems to mirror what we've heard from the radical left for many generations now. Dismiss all contradictory evidence as tainted, but require no particular "burden of proof" of your own side's allegations. It seems like a condition that makes all kind of abuse possible and successful. What would Hannah Arendt say, I wonder?

Well, she said that we've never been able to trust our politicians, and that the realm of truth-telling lies outside politics. She also noted that factual truth is always vulnerable to political power. That's because power rests on narrative, and narrative, a cracking good yarn, beats the rigors of critical thinking every time. This is why in Trump-world anecdote always trumps data. A story about an immigrant who murders someone, for example, trumps the overwhelming data that immigrants are law-abiding.

Here's a nice piece on Arendt's thinking about truth:

Factual truth is in great danger of disappearance. It is engaged in a battle with political power, and it is the vulnerability of factual truth that makes deception possible. But this isn’t new either. Factual truth has always been in danger. It is easily manipulated and subject to censorship and abuse. Arendt cautions that factual truth is in danger of “being maneuvered out of the world for a time, and possibly forever.” “Facts and events”, she writes, “are infinitely more fragile things than axioms, discoveries, theories, which are produced by the human mind.”

Something to chew on, that.

4,632,098

 As of this morning, Joe Biden's lead over Donald Trump stands at 4,632,098.

There is a lot of talk about voting irregularities, and the president's team, those that have not come down with the Corona virus after attending the election night watch party at the White House, are bringing lawsuits right and left. It should be noted that by and large these lawsuits make allegations, but provide no evidence. Many seem ludicrous, and some have already been dismissed by judges, citing lack of evidence. Most, even if they were to be won by the Trump side, would not effect the outcome of the races.

A good summary of the cases is here.

The question is, why? Why all these ridiculous lawsuits? The alarmist answers, he's laying the groundwork for a coup! I'm not much worried about that one. Yet. He can't even pull off a press conference at the Four Seasons in Philly, let alone a coup.

I think he's going down fighting, the only way he knows how. None of it has to do with rationality, or the good of the country, or fair play, but only with preserving the Trump brand. To do that, he has to create a narrative about a stolen election. After that, he walks out of the White House as the center of "the resistance." And that, my friends, can be a quite lucrative new career.

* * *

See also:

Be Alarmed

The Numbers

 In 2016 Hillary Clinton bested Donald Trump in the popular vote by just under 3 million votes and by 2.1%. With several 3rd party candidates polling well (relatively speaking), both the major party candidates were held below 50%.

1. Clinton: 65,853,625 (48%)
2. Trump: 62,985,106 (45.9%)

In 2020, at this stage of the counting, both candidates have significantly improved on those numbers.

1. Biden: 74,566,732 (50.5%)
2. Trump: 70,396,573 (47.7%)

In other words, the Democratic share of the vote improved by 2.5%, while the Republican share by 1.8%. Both Parties bettered their showing over the previous election, but the Dems improved more. Biden, so far, has added 8.7 million votes, while Trump has added 7.4 million. If you take only these roughly 16.1 million extra votes, you see that Biden won 54% of them. 

It was a close race, turnout was amazing, and the country is clearly divided. All talk of a mandate, and what kind of mandate, or whether there is a mandate at all arising form these totals, is mostly political gamesmanship. Everyone will strongly aver that the mandate coming out of this election is for Biden to do exactly what they want him to do. But I will say this: I think it was mainly a mandate for sanity and calm, an end to bellicosity and constant recrimination, a return to being able to take the president seriously. That's just my opinion.

On Faith & Politics

 I'm writing this post early on the Saturday after the election. I'm listening to Gerry Mulligan and looking forward to going to a men's breakfast at church.

We don't generally talk about politics at church. I could guess at what some of my brothers are thinking, and I'm pretty sure of which way one of them voted, but that's about it. We are not a red or a blue or even a purple church. This reticence about politics probably speaks to a determination to not let ourselves be divided along political lines. 

And not to be distracted. A church is a group of people who think they are on to something. On to something big. Virtually everything else seems like a lesser thing, and on these lesser things we may and often do differ. 

We have no authority apart from Jesus. Our authority runs in very narrow but not insignificant paths. We have the authority to forgive. To withhold judgement. To offer grace far and wide in the interest of displaying the beauty of of God in Christ (God as seen, as revealed, in Jesus).

But of course there are Christians who do put politics first. Personally, I think they are making a big mistake. I think it's corrupting. Show me a politics-first person who does not believe his or her political opponents are stupid and evil, and you will have shown me the exception, not the rule.

[Note: I've moved on from Mulligan to the Houdak Trio for my background music. This stuff is incredible!]

Where was I? Oh yeah, the matter of politics and faith. I do think a political program may well flow from a faith position. Actually, it would be strange if one didn't. And I also think that many of us (us Christian believers) have not thought these connections and transitions through. Our political views are alongside our faith-understanding, but unrelated. Our politics is a sort of cultural inheritance, and we have been careful to give it preferential treatment, protected status.

It's similar to not letting your faith disturb your attraction to violence, or to pornography. I am not equating political views to sin, but when anything has a protected and untouchable place in our psyche, it is an idol.

A sign of this sort of idolization is our willingness to lie on behalf of our political interests. You see, if our politics flowed from our faith in Christ, we would never lie for politics. Or for a politician. If Christ comes first, lying is off the menu, sorry.

That is what has disturbed me most about Evangelical supporters of Trump. The willingness to pass on the official lies of the administration. To call lies truth. When you think a man is beyond the reach of ordinary sensible skepticism, that man is your idol. You are enmeshed in sin.

* * *

Read also:

We Are All Revenants, by Bradley Jersak

The Waiting Is the Hardest Part

It looks like, probably, Joe Biden is our next president.

The vote-totals are coming in with excruciating slowness, but today . . . maybe . . . is the day we may get all the outstanding ballots counted in Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, the 4 key states that remain "up for grabs."

There is a sudden upsurge of Christians quoting Psalm 146 on Facebook: "Put not your trust in princes." The funny thing is, as far as I can tell, many of them have been doing just that for the past 4 years. But now that a prince from the hated Democratic Party seems about to come into power, these people have now re-discovered the famous Bible passage.

Which brings me to a rather difficult subject: as a Christian, I am deeply disturbed at the tendency of many fellow-believers to pass on the lies, unsubstantiated accusations, and sheer propaganda emanating from the the Trump camp.

They're not only putting their trust in a prince, they're aiding and abetting his lies.

I think we've drank the Kool-Aid of political power, at the expense of our credibility. The nonsense we've spouted if laid end to end would make a footbridge to Saturn. We have not only reluctantly supported a bad man (because judges), but we have become like him in many ways.

The taint will be hard to lose.

Have we been as shrewd as serpents but as innocent as doves? No, quite the opposite. Neither shrewd nor innocent. 

The larger picture here is one of Discipleship, or Christian formation, in our churches. Or the lack thereof. Too big and complex an issue to tackle here, but something that is certainly on my mind.

Happy Friday!

* * *

Read also:

Some Thoughts about Kooks

The Day After the Day After

I've got a hunch that every day is going to feel like "the day after" for a while yet. 

For some, the whole point of "the day after" is to somehow rescind, smudge out, or de-authorize what happened the day of. Call it "the Great Undermining." 

I think it has become an American institution as predictable as "I voted" stickers on the first Tuesday of November. 

* * *

Then there's this: Alan Jacobs on the dirty little secret that all of us know but don't want to admit: America is simply far less competent than it used to be.

What we need as a nation, more than anything else I can think of, is a recommitment to basic competence, and, especially, a refusal to accept ideological justifications for plain old ineptitude. Too often Americans give a free pass to bunglers and bozos who belong to their tribe.

And this: not everything needs to be political.

If everything is about politics, we cannot cultivate a healthy Good, and if we don’t cultivate a healthy Good, we cannot have healthy politics. 

 

 

Aftermath

Things I'm thinking this morning:

• Pollsters, all of yuz (all except the Trafalgar guy) need to go back to polling school or something. Give me a break, Nate Silver. You guys stink at what you do.
• Also, my "License to Pundit" is hereby officially revoked.
• The President's speech last night was, unsurprisingly, banal, self-serving, devoid of logic.
• Although it's not officially in the bag, it appears that Susan Collins has won her Senate bid in Maine. After a gazillion utterly and almost exclusively negative ads attempting to destroy her character, over a period of months, paid for by out-of-state organizations, this result at least makes me happy.
• We may wind up with another popular vote/Electoral College split. Unfortunate, that. Is a battle to abolish the EC the next big fight?
• Whoever wins this thing, we will be ok. Don't let the doomsayers get you down!

All that having been said, there is still a path for Biden to win this thing. Biden has 227 Electoral College votes. OK, applying the strange and mysterious voodoo known as math, it looks like 43 more are necessary for him to secure victory. Among the states still in play, according to the New York Times map, Biden presently leads in these three:

• Nevada - 6 votes
• Arizona - 11 votes
• Wisconsin - 10 votes

Giving these to Biden, he now stands at 254 in the EC. Only 16 more needed. They can come from this pool:

• Michigan - 16
• Pennsylvania - 20
• North Carolina - 15
• Georgia - 16

Pennsylvania seems out of reach. Michigan is still in reach though. Georgia and North Carolina are closer, but there are also far fewer votes left to count. If Biden were to win North Carolina alone, his total in the EC would be 269, a tie! And a tie, as we know, moves the venue of this election into the House of Representatives, where each state delegation gets one vote, and the Republicans presently hold the edge there.

So Biden has to win one of the other three states. Do I think it's going to happen? Who knows? I'm giving up on the prognostication game.

* * *

Trump's Supreme Court Vow Was What He Planned All Along

The Day at Last, and Keeping Trepidation to a Minimum

Well, the last day is here. It's the final day of the election season, or perhaps I should say it's the first day of the Days of Counting Ballots, which may turn out to be a season unto itself. We have made it this far without utterly destroying ourselves, which seems some sort of an accomplishment.

As I write these words, very nearly 100 million people have voted. I don't know for certain what that means about the outcome of the race, but it's pretty awe-inspiring nonetheless. By most estimates, about 50 million more voters will go to the polls today, the traditional "election day."

Dixville Notch has voted, of course. They're all-in for Biden, 5-0.

And there is nothing left to say. I could talk about the polls, or the lawsuits brought by the president's legal-eagles (aka, henchmen) which are uniformly to stop actual votes from being counted, or whether 2020 will run true to form and computers will go down for all the the ballot counters in Pennsylvania. They'll have to break out the abaci (abacuses, for you rubes), which were being stockpiled in a Luzerne County coal mine for just such a necessity. Results are promised by Deer Season of 2021.

Things I hope for this day:

• Nobody gets shot.
• No "peaceful demonstrators" run riot through the streets breaking the few remaining storefronts which haven't been boarded up.
• All the votes get counted.
• Biden wins in a landslide.

That last one I'm of two minds about, because I actually look forward to a Biden administration with some trepidation. But not as much as I have for another Trump administration. This year my vote is for "Keeping Trepidation to a Minimum." 

I'll be watching the returns on TV and also various websites of course. This here will be my dashboard.

* * *

Read also:

How to Watch the Election like a Political Journalist

1 Day and (no longer) Counting

  It's hard to get used to the idea that we don't really have an election day anymore, but an election season. Tomorrow is simply the last day of that season, but it is one that all of America seems to be looking forward to with a combination of excitement and trepidation, It is safe to say that virtually everyone is hoping that tomorrow will bring them relief. There is an emotional investment here on a scale that I have never seen. How many people have told me, "I'm just trying not to let it get to me." But that's a clear sign that, try as we might, it's getting to us.

The early vote tabulation is up to 94 million. The RCP polling average gives Biden a 7.2% lead, but the most recent poll (NBC News/WSJ) puts Biden ahead by 10%. In the battle ground states, things are close as can be in Florida, North Carolina, Texas (!), Arizona, Nevada. The most recent poll in Pennsylvania has Trump winning by 2. That may be an outlier, as it diverges from virtually all the previous polls, or it may be a sign of a late trend in a state that Trump and his family and have made their home away from home.

This weekend journalists everywhere released their fate-of-the-republic pieces, a journalistic tradition going back to 1796 I suppose. This gets us back to the "emotional investment" I mentioned at the start. I am undecided as to whether this emotionality is a very good sign for the Republic, or a bad one for our own well-being as a people. 

I keep going back to the election of 1800, which was the first in which the government changed hands, one political party to another. That election proved to everyone that there could be a peaceful exchange of power in America, even after an incredibly contentious election season filled with personal animus and over-the-top predictions of doom. But the important thing to remember is that that the loser in that case was John Adams, an honorable man who excepted the results quietly. In this case, however, the likely loser, Donald Trump, is promising to continue the contention in the courts, working hard to disallow votes in carefully selected swing states, all the while accusing Biden (this is a dead certainty) of trying to steal the election.

Which reminds me, the best thing to do when you're running out of a bank with the alarm bells ringing and a money bag clutched in your fist is to point to the nearest person and yell, "Stop, thief!"

Getting back to "emotional investment." I have always believed that this country has staying power, and that that staying power is based partly on laws and partly on customs and intangible but deep-seated ways of thinking about ourselves as a nation. There is a great host of voters out there that do not believe the country should be run by one partisan faction or another, but that it runs best when those factions are willing (or forced) to compromise. Some (well, a lot) of the emotionality of the electorate is owing to a misguided belief that everything depends on one faction getting the upper hand and keeping it. Then the chosen one can rule by fiat (AKA, executive order). Screw the hard work (and compromise) of putting together legislative coalitions to pass bills. That would mean compromising with the partisans on the other side, whom you have trained the electorate to think of as pure evil.

Politics shouldn't be civil war by another means.

But I have been going on long enough. What I'm hoping is that Biden, who will be our next president, will rule somewhat like Lincoln planned to after a bloody civil war: healing the wounds and working hard for amity, repairing the damaged ship of state. If he can do this, it will have been truly a signal election, and he will solidify his place in history.

* * *

Read Also:

Trump's Ego Defeating Him, Biden's No So Much

How Trump could still win this thing

Could the Supreme Court Decide Trump vs. Biden?

Tuesday (Richard Brookhiser)

How We Heal (David French)