Dissonance and Democracy

It feels as if we're living within a William Faulkner novel with the entire country part of the story.

Some of my friends have been posting in Facebook about the speech President Obama made on my campus this past Friday.  I watched it on replay, in bits and chunks, so I could work through what I was hearing.  It is a speech addressed to college-age students who are old enough to vote.  The core message was exactly that.  Vote.  Work to get out the vote of others.  If enough of that happens, the system will autocorrect, not immediately but over time, not perfectly but sufficiently that we can feel good about the society we live in.  President Obama was careful enough to say there is no guarantee this will happen.  The current situation, with concentrated powerful interests holding sway, has means and motive to sustain that. But the masses have voting as a way to restore real democracy.

The thing is, this is not a fair fight and it hasn't been for some time.  The Constitution itself builds in some of this unfairness.  Wyoming gets the same number of Senators as California.  And Puerto Rico, which has more than 5 times the population of Wyoming, gets none. This much we probably have to live with.  But that unfairness might be brought to the light of day.  To my knowledge, it largely goes ignored.

Then there is the gerrymandering, which has received considerable attention.  To a certain extent, gerrymandering does at the House of Representatives district level what making a state into a state does at the Senate level.  Gerrymandering is definitely not in the Constitution.  The number of Representatives per state is determined roughly by the Census.  The population of the state relative to the population of the country as a whole gives the pro rata number of Representatives for that state.  But the borders of the individual Congressional districts within a state are set at the state level.  Currently the Republicans hold the vast majority of governorships and state houses.  You can pretty well guess that the gerrymandering will continue.

Then there is voter participation.  In today's New York Times there is an Op-Ed about voter suppression.  It is disturbing to read about how the voter suppression discriminates against poor minority voters.

Then there is the Citizen United decision and the ridiculous consequences on campaign spending.   The Koch brothers are reported to be spending $400 million on the upcoming election.  That's free speech!

This past week David Leonhardt wrote in a column that argued, among other things, that the Republicans stole a Supreme Court seat.  In a column a day later, Paul Krugman said it really was two Supreme Court seats that were stolen.  The seat Merrick Garland would have filled is one.  That the seat went unfilled may have turned the election, where a majority of voters nonetheless voted for Hillary Clinton. So the Presidency itself may have been stolen (Krugman didn't say that, but I am) and that, in turn, is how the second Supreme Court seat got stolen.  I'm more inclined towards Krugman's accounting on this matter than Leonhardt's.

So, one wants to know first whether the view by President Obama - get out the vote - can overcome this unfairness or not.  If getting out the vote does work, do the Republicans then get punished for their theft of Supreme Court seats.  Or do we just move on with business as usual?

I do think President Obama can be fairly criticized now for his administration not making a big deal about Russian interference in our elections.  It is possible that his administration could have made a big point of this in August 2016.  But they didn't.  They kept a lid on the information.  I believe that was so they wouldn't be accused of tipping the election, even while the Republicans were doing everything they could to do just that.

Then one wants to know if it is time for Democratic voters to take off the gloves too and start to fight dirty, to match the Republicans who have been doing it for some time.  What would fighting dirty mean?  I confess here something of a mental block.  My thought process is that I'm both worried and scared about what might happen.  I would like to have the powerful interests and Republicans in Congress share those feelings.  So I've been asking myself what would do that.  My mental block is that I haven't had good answers to that question apart from the threat of violence upon them. But maybe there are other answers.  Perhaps embarrassment can work or organized campaigns (shut down Koch Industries - they exacerbate global warming, shut down Fox News - they regularly broadcast lies, and so on).   I am not skilled about how to make video go viral, but that knowledge exists. Such campaigns are possible.

It also might be that some more surreptitious methods, employed by hackers with Democratic sympathies, can work some magic.  I don't know, but it also seems possible.

Play it clean or play it dirty, not as a first mover but as a response to the Republicans, which should it be?  I think that question is worth asking as is thinking through an answer.