It's often said that if you invoke the Nazis, you lose any online argument. On the other hand, how close to a dangerous authoritarianism do you have to get, before those who are sanguine about it turn out to be the foolish ones?
On the one hand, a close examination of the physical ballots involved in the election will eventually be necessary. I have no objections in theory to any group exhausting all legal challenges and remedies. On the other hand, the president is not a person who can be trusted. If he could find his own version of the Reichstag fire, he would do it in a second.
That's why I don't buy the stuff from right-wing media, to the effect of, "just asking questions". You have tens of millions of people living in an alternate reality anyway, and a good number of them will not renounce violence, or in any manner accept the results.
We ought to keep our processes and timelines firm. Challenge whatever you like, but it's all over by December 14. And if you're in court, it's "put up or shut up" time. The common rabble can believe whatever it wants about stolen elections, but in a court of law, you prove what you are saying, or you go away.
On the other hand, I don't think anyone thinks it's a good thing that large numbers of people have mistrust in our electoral processes. Then again, an epistemic flaw is not the same thing as a democratic flaw. If you are the problem, you can't expect everyone else in the system to shape their beliefs to your own.
It was almost inevitable that it would end this way. We had never been governed by someone so pathologically narcissistic. Those people fall hard. And they try to take as many people down with them as they can. I don't need a doctorate in psychology to figure this one out. The real astonishing thing will be the number of people who can't acknowledge this basic reality. There is always a small group of people who claim to be above the emotional fray, but when the truth is revealed, they are revealed as the most hardened partisans that could be found.
I would say wake me up when it is over, but I'll be watching. I will continue to do what I have always done, which is attempt in my own way to put the world in order. Someone may not like the conclusions I reach, but I don't like Tom Hanks, and the world still seems to go on.
Comments