Not Rigged Elections but Democratic Despotism Threatens Our Highest Ideals

No one is talking about the real crisis. And no one can stop talking about the phony crisis.

This is an article about two claims of a “crisis of our democracy” in 2020. You can tell the real crisis from the phony crisis because no one is talking about the real crisis. And no one can stop talking about the phony crisis.

It seems, now, that President Trump may have lost reelection well before the November 3 election day. Latest news reports are that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has overturned a decision of the state’s lower court that had entertained a Republican challenge to the mail-in ballot changes made in the runup to the election.

Pennsylvania, of course, is a pivotal state in the 2020 election calculation. It has 20 electoral votes and Trump won it in 2016 by less than 1 percent of the vote. In 2020, Democratic presidential candidate Joseph Biden won it by just over 1 percent. In Pennsylvania in particular the fairness of the vote is under attack. As it is in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin.

The decision of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court is not the end. The President’s legal team now can appeal that decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. Almost certainly, this legal sequence was intended: work up from district court to an appeal to the state Supreme Court, and, whatever the decision there, the losing side would appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court (which has complete discretion to accept or reject consideration of the case). But it is not insignificant that the SCOTUS majority, today, is “conservative”—tending to adhere to the word of the U.S Constitution—and several key justices sit on the Court thanks to the unwavering support of the Trump administration and the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate against attacks on the nominees by the mainstream media.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejected the Republican case against legislation enacted to change long-standing regulation of mail-in ballots. The court ruled that the challenge might be valid, but said it failed for want of timely submission to the court. The changes in the law regarding mail-in ballots had been enacted a year ago. And could have been challenged anytime since then. The Republican challenge coming after the presidential election asked the court in effect to invalidate tens of millions of votes of Pennsylvanians.

Layman’s translation: Why the hell didn’t you challenge these changes until your guy (Trump) lost the vote? Now, you want not only a decision on the mail-in legislation changes, but a decision on the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election vote of Pennsylvanians.

It was a legal/regulatory revolution toward dismantling election safeguards on who could vote, how they could vote, how they could establish their bona fides, when votes must be received.

All over America, in state after state, as the 2020 election loomed, Democrats driven by the absolute that they must “Beat Trump” enacted changes in long-established guidelines for elections. In effect, it was a legal/regulatory revolution toward dismantling election safeguards on who could vote, how they could vote, how they could establish their bona fides, when votes must be received …

The premise driving these changes was that in 2016 Donald Trump had been elected president by White Supremacists—white males without a college education … the white male power structure …

Every unsubstantiated, racist, neo-Marxist ideological dogma of the postmodernists became the headline editorial explanation of Trump’s 2016 victory. Inevitably, the next four years involved left-Democrats in a drive to change the composition of the electorate—even if it meant voting by illegal immigrants, anyone who returned a statewide mail-in ballot (California), and the widely reported orders to election workers to favor Democratic ballots.

President Trump promptly tweeted that mail-in ballots will lead to “substantial fraud,” and he regularly repeated his warnings. Twitter added safety warnings to Trump’s tweets and the media opposed him.

The legality of ballot drop boxes and the deadline for counting postmarked mail-in votes was contested in court, and by October, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was asked to judge the legality of election officials rejecting a mail-in ballot due to signatures not matching (and in each case, the judgment was in favor of the Democrats’ strategy).

However, the verdict is not in. Rudy Giuliani, heading the Trump campaign’s legal challenge, has said that the challenge to the outcome of the 2020 presidential election is by six possible avenues to the U.S. Supreme Court. In Pennsylvania, the decision now of the state Supreme Court means that that strategy has succeeded in opening that avenue.

Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, said recently that the stealing of the U.S. presidential election in 2020 may be the most egregious election theft since 1824, when the election was thrown into the U.S. House of Representatives, where John Quincy Adams was elected president.

Many others have said the election was a fraud and there are also independent legal challenges. See here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

What might be one “contrarian” confirmation of fraud is the obsessive reiteration by mainstream media that Biden has won. President Trump and his legal team are challenging the election outcome in a way unprecedented in history. If the challenger were Hillary Clinton in 2016, the mainstream media would be crusading for her.

The Crisis for Democracy in 2020

That is the status, for now, of the skirmish over election rigging. This is the moment, however, to say that rigging the voting system was not the election’s “crisis of democracy.” In hindsight, it has become clear that the henchmen of John F. Kennedy stole the 1960 election from Richard Nixon. And that was not the first fraudulent U.S. election, either.

In this election we were wagering the industrial revolution against the Green New Deal. Our crisis is the belief that a majority vote can legitimize that decision.

A better question is why partisans on both sides view this election as fateful for America? The answer is: It’s rapidly becoming an age of democratic despotism. Increasingly, anything is subject to change by vote. To take just one example from 2020: In this election we were wagering the industrial revolution against the Green New Deal. Our crisis is the belief that a majority vote can legitimize that decision.

Today we are not, as the postmodernist neo-Marxists claim, reaching for the fulfillment of the American dream, the American ideal. That is the biggest of big lies. We are perverting the dream and the ideal. We are ushering in its opposite. And the method is democracy, and rigged or “fair” scarcely matters.

To those who voted for Trump and those who voted for Biden everything is as stake. Will America vote to reverse the Industrial Revolution and economic prosperity for a future where man abjures his nature—as the species that survives using reason to adapt nature to his needs? Will we “defund the police,” so that the documented, demonstrated crime wave of black homicide no longer has a price to the perpetrators? Will we declare American citizenship promiscuously available to all comers, legal and illegal—a nation with no right to its borders? Will we embrace a government takeover of the hospital and medical care system, taking another long step in sweeping away the private health insurance industry and enforcing socialized medicine? Will we accept a state’s authority to halt businesses, travel, even recreation … because their “experts” decide it is in the “public health” interest to disrupt our lives?

Every four years the will of the American electorate is expected to decide matters that can upend the lives and plans of every American.

Every four years the will of the American electorate is expected to decide matters that can upend the lives and plans of every American. Vote to make or unmake every U.S. business. Vote to give thumbs up to the American fossil fuel industry—or thumbs down. Vote to valorize Tesla and the future of the electric automobile—and ring down the curtain on the rest of the auto industry as well as U.S. utilities, and oil and gas exploration, drilling, and refinement.

The United States of America, the nation born of the 18^th century Enlightenment, explicitly rejected all arbitrary political power—including, and especially, the despotism of the majority. The American ideal is individual rights, guaranteed by a constitution, protected from political power by strictly limiting government—including what is subject to vote. It was an ideal that inexorably drove the nation to risk its existence in a great war to end slavery.

The only liberty is the freedom defined and guaranteed by individual rights. Ayn Rand wrote that “Rights are moral principles that define and sanction man’s freedom of action in a social context.”

It is a statement directed against democratic despotism as much as the despotism of kings. If the majority, in free and fair elections, had voted for the continuation of black slavery—and, of course, given each slave a vote—not one whit of moral legitimacy would have attached to the continued slavery.

Because voting cannot establish the legitimacy of a principle. Voting can only settle differences among people who all share principles. And those principles are individual rights that never are subject to vote because, as our Declaration of Independence says, they are “inalienable.”

Taking the life, liberty, or property of one individual (who has violated no one else’s rights) cannot be made moral by the vote of everyone else in the electorate. That principle of social interaction, including action through government, is based on a sustained unassailable logic: an attack on the principle of rights is a threat to every individual’s rights.

And the life and death importance of rights derives, in turn, from the unassailable logic that human survival depends upon reason—and reason is a faculty of individuals. To think, to make judgments, to act on those judgments, to live with resulting rewards or penalties—and to do so over an entire lifetime with confidence that no criminal, government, or foreign power will appear to take it at gunpoint (even if a majority is willing to vote to point the gun)—is the only fully human life. And only the principle of inalienable individual rights makes it possible.

By all means, let the challenges to the validity of the election continue to be fought in the courts, not the streets. But let’s remember the more crucial issue: constraining the power of the majority to violate the minority by vote; as Rand said, “the smallest minority on earth is the individual.”

The author thanks Vinay Kolhatkar and Donna Paris for their comments and edits on prior drafts.    

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3. Ayn Rand’s Aristotelian Philosophy of Human Flourishing

   

About the Author: Walter Donway

Walter Donway contributes to Savvy Street on political economy, science, and trends in fiction, film, and culture. Walter Donway’s most recent book is Donald Trump and His Enemies: How the Media Put Trump in Office (Romantic Revolution Books: New York, September 2017). His Amazon profile can be found here