What the hell do we do now?

December 10, 2016

Quick update, for those who haven’t been following the news.

The CIA has reportedly concluded that, not only did Russia interfere with the US election, it did it not to increase distrust in our system in general, but specifically to elect Donald Trump.

This is based on the conclusion that not only was the Democratic National Committee hacked, but the Republican National Committee was hacked as well—and that information was not released. This is among other preexisting evidence that it was Russian agents who performed the DNC hack. President Obama has ordered a full review.

This all comes in a day when Rex Tillerson, the chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil, is expected to be named Trump’s Secretary of State—a man with numerous ties to Russia, and Putin in particular, who would then be in a position to lift the sanctions preventing ExxonMobil from consummating a deal potentially worth $500 billion with Russia’s Rosneft.

This has led to a movement called the Hamilton Electors, who are so named because of Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist No. 68, which said that the electoral college was there to prevent foreign powers from gaining an “improper ascendant in our councils.” At least one Texas Republican elector has vowed to not vote for Trump, and the Hamilton Electors movement is trying to coalesce around an alternative, with Ohio Governor John Kasich being most often cited.

I have a lot of thoughts about all of this, and a lot of them are conflicted.

When I look into my crystal ball to a future where the electoral college overturns the election results as previous understood and award the election to John Kasich, or Hillary Clinton, or anyone but Donald Trump, I can’t help feeling that won’t go well. We, as a nation, have gone down this road before, so it’s not entirely uncharted, but the world isn’t as it was when it stopped an Aaron Burr presidency and delayed an Andrew Jackson one. Yet, when I see the future with a President Trump, it looks increasingly untenable—if he’s willing to govern on the back of explicit Russian support, and appoint a Secretary of State who would so clearly have a massive conflict of interests (rivaling only his own), it becomes harder to imagine that we’ll have much of a democracy to vote him out of office in four years.

That sounds like hyperbole. That feels so much like hyperbole. But consider Watergate. For once we have a scandal that can actually be usefully compared to Watergate, and we’re not giving it a nonsense ___gate name. Fucking ridiculous, but that’s the world we’re in.

Notice what I said there. A scandal that can be “usefully compared to Watergate.” That’s burying the lede—this may well exceed Watergate, and for similar reasons.

Recall that the problem with Watergate was not that Nixon lied. Bill Clinton lied too, and he didn’t get impeached—though it was a near-run thing, so such baldfaced lying isn’t suggested. Or it used to not be. But anyway, the problem with Watergate was not that Nixon lied, but that he was willing tamper with the democratic process. I’ll let the man who tipped me off to this say it in his words, pulled from a tweetstorm I suggest you read in its entirety.

So, that’s where we are. Or where we might be. It still feels like hyperbole. It took a long time for me to come to terms with the reality that the Great Recession was big enough that students would be learning about it for decades to come, and that still wasn’t as big as its prior, the Great Depression. Now we face a scandal that may exceed the greatest political scandal in US history, Watergate.

We truly are living in interesting times, and I’m not talking about the 2000 election interesting, a hiccup that will fascinate history buffs as they wonder what might have been if it had gone just a little differently. I’m talking treason and impeachment, or even worse. This could be Death of the Republic territory. This could be our own fall of Rome.

And we don’t even get a dictator as remarkable as Julius Caesar. We get Donald Fuckin’ Trump. So the American experiment might implode, and we’ll be a laughingstock in history forever after. Lovely.

Or it might not. I remain conflicted because I’m not the kind of man who gets riled up, and anything said in such a dire tone sets off all my internal alarms, even if I’m the one saying them. Crazy stuff has happened before, and we’ve survived. We’ve always survived. And even though I know past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results, it sure doesn’t feel like we’re at the end of the Republic. Everyone thinks they’re living through the end times, and they never are. We’ve always survived.

And yet, in what shape will we survive? And for how long.

I’m conflicted because it seems unlikely that enough electors will coalesce around a consensus candidate to block Trump. Maybe enough will refuse to vote for Trump and it’ll get thrown to the House of Representatives—and I’m not confident they House will do what they ought in that situation. I damn well hope so, but I’m not confident of it, and it’s going to be a rough time if it comes to that.

Even then, the cogent matter from my point of view is whether I should push for the Hamilton Electors to decide for us. My gut instinct after the election was no—the system sucked, but that’s the system we had, and with all his (many) warts and all, the electoral college vote came out on the side of Trump. So we would have to survive. But when it becomes so clear that he has no idea what he’s doing, and that Putin is playing him like a fiddle, and that America four years from now might not be recognizable from the one we see today—well, let’s say a couple of years ago. Today is pretty messed up too, but not irreparable.

I think about all this, and I come back to one missive I read earlier, which I can’t get out of my head.

https://twitter.com/RealLucasNeff/status/807632919187652608

A foreign government sought to manipulate our election for their benefit, and they succeeded. Maybe he would have been elected anyway, but that’s not the world we live in. Russia meddled in our election, and if Donald Trump becomes president, they’ll get what they want.

I’m right to be outraged. You should be too.

I’m a contrary son of a bitch. If someone messes with my election, I don’t want them to get what they want, even if I don’t get to have the candidate I would have preferred.

If it was Mike Pence, or Ted Cruz, or damn near any Republican, I would not be worried. If they won fair and square by the rules of the system, even if that system sucks, I would live with it. I would continue to try to reform that system, but I would not advocate for anything like the Hamilton Electors; I would live with it, as we all did after the 2000 election.

But this is not that. I would welcome a Mike Pence presidency. I would get down on my knees and weep for a President Cruz. I vehemently oppose almost everything those men stand for, but Mike Pence knows that booing is “what freedom sounds like,” and if anyone thinks Ted Cruz would be a friend to Russia, you do not know Ted Cruz. He’s a thorn in the side even to his allies. Putin would not find an ally in that man.

I say all that to describe where I’m at emotionally, but it bears repeating: Democracy is not about who wins. Democracy is about the process. The CIA says our process was sabotaged. We should be outraged. If Trump had rejected Russian help, and the Republican establishment had stood up against outside interference, we would be in a different place. I’d be where I was after the election, not happy, but not nearly so scared.

That is not the world we live in. We should be outraged. They tampered with our elections, and are getting everything they want. We shouldn’t let them get away with this. I’ll be contacting my representatives, and broadcasting my voice as far as it’ll go, in the hopes that we can stave off this disaster.

We can afford a bad president. We’ve had a lot of bad presidents. We’ve never had a puppet of a foreign government in the White House. Real patriots, the kind who care more about the fundamental principles our nation was founded on rather than what someone does with a flag or who chooses not to stand during the anthem, should do everything in their power to make sure that doesn’t happen.

I’ll leave you with two more thoughts, encapsulated in tweets.

This, from a man who once talked about “grabbing [his] musket.” And then:

If it’s time for a South Carolinian senator prone to fits of hysterics to ride to our rescue, I’m ready for that reality. Hysterics may be necessary. I hope Senator John McCain is with him as well, and shows us the man he was when he took the microphone away from his own supporter and said that Obama is “a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with.” And I hope enough others, in the Senate, and the House, and across the nation, do the same.

Resist.

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