There is a strange sort of democracy in much, or most, of Africa. They have elections in those countries, but nothing ever changes as a result. In a typical African election, voters are intimidated at the polls, or discouraged from voting. Once the votes are cast, they are tallied up and the result may or may not reflect the reality of who people actually voted for. If the incumbent president is sufficiently powerful, he will just announce a victory by a landslide and that will be that. The army will see to it that no one starts a popular insurrection to restore the real result of the vote. If he is less powerful, excuses will be invented for why the election was fraudulent, or some injustice will be invented, the net result of which means that the incumbent president will hold on to power until the farce is repeated a few years down the line.
In Western democracies, that is not how it works. No matter how awful the candidates are, it is assumed by the populace that the system, while it may be inherently unfair, is what it is and that within its parameters, the election is played out according to the rules. The vote counts are not fraudulent and the loser admits defeat, immediately, and with no messing around. No one stops you going to the polls and no one knows how you voted.
In Switzerland, voting, referenda and elections work like a watch that has been painstakingly put together in one of the manufactures. We have them very regularly, several per year, so it is no surprise that the whole process has been refined to the nth degree. There are voting stations everywhere – in every village. You can vote by post, or just drop the envelope into the village council’s post-box a few days in advance. If you want to show up in person, that’s fine too. It’s all biro on bits of paper, nothing automated, so nothing is going to get hacked or go wrong. The votes are all tallied up the moment voting stops and the results collated. It’s all done in a few hours and the results are announced on the early evening news.
You would think that the USA, the richest country in the world of real size and the inventor of countless new bits of technology, would have no problem with the odd vote. After all, it’s not as if they are a surprise – they have been happening every 4 years for decades or centuries. But this is not the case. The mere concept of postal voting seems to be beyond Americans in many places and the postal system is so underfunded, crumbling and useless that it seems it can’t even be relied on to deliver letters. Machines register the votes and they are prone to breaking down, which is bizarre when you think that the Americans have perfected gambling machines that can’t be any simpler and which don’t seem to break down. There are, we are told on the podcast Breach, several ways in which the American system can be hacked by nefarious parties (that will probably be Russia, then).
The American system is also needlessly arcane. In a French presidential election, you add up all the votes of the final round and the guy or gal with the most wins. Simple. There are 67 million people in France, so it’s not like voting for your parish council. They seem to be able to organise it. But in the US, each state has a vote and then sends representatives to the electoral college to elect the president. The amount of representatives varies by state - more populous states have more representatives, which seems blindingly logical. What is a lot less logical, and even fairly cretinous, if we are honest, is that the USA, the greatest democracy on Earth, as we are always being told, wilfully disenfranchises about half its voters in 48 of the 50 states. This is because all of them with the exception of Maine and Nebraska operate a first part of the post system where the winning candidate in each state gets all the college votes from that state. So, if you look at Texas with 38 representatives to the electoral college, if Trump wins there, 38 people will go to the college to vote for him, even if he was the preferred candidate by only 51% of the Texan electorate. This makes no sense at all for a two-horse presidential race.
So that’s the suboptimal situation in which the forthcoming US presidential election is going to be played out. Still, nothing really new there. It’s been equally nonsensical for decades and the Americans have always got over it. Ah, but that was before Trump moved into the White House.
It is helpful if you think of Trump not as a politician but as a guru, a sect-leader. This is because he has a lot more in common with gurus than politicians. Charlatan sect-leaders talk an awful lot of rubbish which is swallowed whole by their acolytes. Nothing is ever held up to scrutiny because it if were, the guru would be seen to be talking complete baloney. Within the sect, any outside means of education is discouraged or banished. There is no book worth reading because the guru already has the answers, and the world outside the sect is de facto anti-sect and a threat to the guru and the beliefs of his (or her, occasionally) followers. Sects specialise in promised utopias which never materialise and the demonising of the Other – anyone who is not a member of the sect. All sects eventually come down to intrigues of money, sex and power, the guru being motivated by any or all of these things, usually all. Finally, sects are hugely tenacious and gurus never willingly give up power. They die on the job, or the sect falls foul of the law and the guru gets sent down.
So, in what way does Trump look like a sect leader? For a start, there is his fanatical following. As he has pointed out on at least two occasions (and possibly many more), if you are famous, you can do anything you like to women and get away with it or shoot someone on 5th Avenue in New York and suffer no consequences. His fanbase will forgive him anything. It doesn’t matter what you tell them, or what turpitude Trump sinks himself in, they just don’t care. They have no more critical faculties than your average Scientologist. The President cheats on his taxes? He’s smart! He has an unhealthy interest in Russia? It’s all made up! He’s a walking disaster when it comes to managing the pandemic? Cut him some slack, no one could have made a better job! Nothing will ever be Trump’s fault and the scales will never fall from the eyes of his adherents. You cannot reason with them. They are fact-proof.
Promised utopia? Make America Great Again. Say no more.
Talking rubbish? Donald Trump, as has been pointed out by almost everyone who is not in his thrall, lies persistently, incorrigibly, and egregiously. He has totally bypassed spin. That’s old hat. Spin suggests you face reality and then put a gloss on it that suits your agenda. Trump just denies reality, which is much more effective, it would appear. Bah, what’s truth anyway? We have our own alternative facts. His continual tweets are just a drip-feed of drivel.
So how is the POTUS guru approaching the election and what will happen come November 3rd? His approach is double. Firstly, he is doing anything in his power to win the race, by using unfair tactics where that can give him the upper hand. Secondly, he is already trying to undermine the validity of the election. In these respects, he is adopting the African dictator playbook.
Cheating to win (something he knows all about) is attempted by putting a crony in charge of the US Postal Service and have him try to sabotage it by refusing to invest enough to get it to work. The thinking is that many postal votes will not arrive in time for the election and thus will not count. It is estimated that a majority of those votes will be for Biden. Other systems are being adopted to prevent black voters from casting their ballot, by making it hard for them to register. Black voters will mainly be voting for Biden. Then you can do good old voter intimidation. Trump’s son has called upon “an army” of Republicans to invest the polling stations to make sure that nothing untoward is going on. What is going to be untoward is gaggles of aggressive, and possibly armed, Trump supporters in Democrat localities discouraging people from voting.
But for the sake of argument, suppose these tactics are insufficient to convince the American electorate to vote the Orange Guru in for another four years of mayhem, what then? Well then, it gets potentially ugly. Trump has been telling anyone who will listen for months now that the only way he can lose the election is if it is fraudulent. He has then told everyone repeatedly that it is going to be fraudulent. As per usual, there isn’t the faintest scrap of evidence for this, but rather as cult-leaders posit their divinity or descendance from aliens or reincarnation of some past luminary, the likelihood of truth is irrelevant for the faithful. If Trump says that he has been cheated out of the presidency (and he will, if he loses), then for his supporters, he will have been. Many of these same supporters are believers in the ludicrous QAnon conspiracy theory, which maintains that the USA and the world is being ruled by a cabal of paedophile Hollywood luminaries and Democrats who drink the blood of children. This tosh is subscribed to by hundreds of thousands of voters. It would be funny if they didn’t have guns.
Trump has been asked on several occasions if he will accept the election result. His current answer is that it depends. He’ll see how he feels about it on the night. What this actually means is that if he loses, he’ll feel sore and will be in no mood to concede defeat. As defeat will mean, in Trumpland, that the election was rigged against him, then it seems highly unlikely that he will just accept the result. This is momentous, or it would have been four years ago. Can you imagine any other election in a Western democracy where the result is called into question before it has already happened? You’d imagine that an intention of not necessarily accepting the result would bar you from the process itself. Not accepting the result is one thing. Too bad for him. The question is, what is he going to do about it?
The good news is that the army will not be bailing him out or shooting Biden. That is where the US doesn’t yet look like a banana republic. The bad news is that shooting there probably will be. Trump has turned parts of the US into a volatile place and it’s never good to have a volatile situation with an angry populace, armed to the teeth with automatic weapons. Some of these people are the Proud Boys, who are a sort of fanatical pro-Trump militia. Asked to disown them during the presidential debate, Trump told them jokingly to “stand back and stand by”, which is the sort of thing that Hitler might have told the Brownshirts. “Stand by” for what? It sounds ominous.
On the other side, you have a very angry Black Lives Matter movement that will not be prepared to take bully-boy tactics lying down. They are armed too. Everyone in the States is armed, and it’s an inherently violent place where people often shoot first and ask questions later or fail to ask any questions at all.
It seems unlikely that Trump will win, but he has now convinced himself that he is invincible. All that power has gone to his head (well, there isn’t much else in it). So how is he going to accept that he’s a loser? He won’t, and his Twitter account will tell everyone that he isn’t. This probably isn’t going to end well.