The Great Disconnect 2 - Republican Democracies

It's now become commonly recognized that Americans are not only more divided than they have been since the Civil War, in cultural terms they are far more divided than when they were actively bearing arms against each other.  The situation is so bad that it's difficult even to hold a civil conversation with one's political opponents - not merely in the sense of being unpleasant, but literally difficult because we don't even agree on what the words mean.  This is seen nowhere more starkly than in the way both sides celebrate "our democracy" and, less frequently, "the republic," while having utterly different conceptions of what those are.

What Is A Constitutional Republic?

After the 2020 election, we published "The End of the Republic" which argued that our constitutional republic is no more because there is no meaningful way for our courts to resolve the "Big Steal."  By definition, a republic is a group of semi-independent political entities which we call "states," that collectively rule themselves by means of representatives.  These, in turn, are supposed to be selected in accordance with the dictates of our Constitution and established law.

The problem is that half the country believes that the Constitution and our laws were not followed, and that, therefore, the rulers who are supposed to be representing us are in fact frauds and impostors holding no legitimate moral authority whatsoever.  In effect, this was the question put before the Courts, but they were well aware of the wider issue. In keeping with America's standing as a 50-50 nation:

Forty-seven percent (47%) say it's likely that Democrats stole voters or destroyed pro-Trump ballots in several states to ensure that Joe Biden would win. Forty-nine percent (49%) consider that unlikely.

What is any court supposed to do with this?  Half the voters in the country believe they were robbed; if the Court flipped the result, the other half would feel robbed.  The Court cannot win no matter what it does.

Given that the media refused to report and suppressed evidence of the fraud, and since a lot of the fraud was perpetrated in ways that cannot be directly proved, it is impossible to imagine any judicial ruling that would be widely accepted.  On top of that, Democrats had amply demonstrated willingness to burn down the homes of anyone who disagreed with them.  What were the justices to do?  Quite reasonably, and humanly, they did - nothing.

This pattern isn't likely to change anytime soon: we see Democrats making strenuous efforts to stop legislation designed to prevent future vote fraud and are even pushing Federal laws to mandate the very voting procedures which have been shown to be most vulnerable to fraud.  This is characteristic of a banana republic, not a Constitutional republic.

The Democrats and their media allies proclaim opposition to their bill as opposition to democracy; the right recognizes those very bills as being the death of democracy by institutionalizing fraud.  By definition, both cannot be true; they are in fact opposite views of the same set of facts.

Perhaps the clearest illustration of the difference is the drumbeat from the left that every vote should be counted.  This sounds good, until you hear the counterargument from the right - that every legal vote should be counted.

In Counting There Is Strength

When Arizona released the results of its audit of the 2020 election, the media trumpeted that Joe Biden had indeed won and that Mr. Trump's accusations were all lies.  But, as is standard practice for the media, that fact, to the extent it's true and accurate, is completely irrelevant to the real point.

The overall total of the votes was never in serious doubt; everyone knew that there were indeed more votes for Mr. Biden sitting in the ballot boxes.  The true question was, how did they get there?

The audit showed that at least 57,000 of the ballots were of uncertain or provably invalid provenance.  The number of questionable votes is far greater than the margin between the candidates; thus, by definition, the election was unreliable and should be voided and rerun.

The left demanded that every vote be counted, which they were, and on that basis their guy won.  The right still is having a hard time determining exactly which of these votes were legal; thus, we cannot accurately exclude the fraudulent, illegally-cast, or stuffed ballots, and therefore never will know who would really have won if the voting laws had been enforced.

Judging from how hard the left is fighting to make sure that voting integrity laws are repealed, banned, and unenforced, it's pretty clear to us what happened and what they hope will continue to happen.  The right recognizes that our elections, on the ground, are so lax as to be nearly meaningless, and that our democracy and republic are therefore meaningless in equal measure; the left trumpets that questioning any election they win is an assault upon that selfsame democracy.

Again, these positions not only cannot both be true, they cannot coexist in a stable polity.  This should be obvious, just as it should be obvious that Joe Biden would be much better off and his rule stronger if he, too, had demanded full, clear, thorough audits to confirm his legitimate victory.  But, quite the contrary, he did everything within his power to ensure audits proving his win were left undone... how strange!

What Constitutes a "Free and fair" Election?

If we cannot agree on what makes for a fair count of legal votes, it should be no surprise that we can't agree on what makes an election fair in the larger sense. Our earlier article "Two Faces of Election Fraud" quotes a lefty article "Election Integrity Is Why Trump Lost the Election, and Why the Dems Will Lose at Trial":

The House [2nd Trump impeachment] managers didn't address the Republican story of why Trump and the rioters are American heroes. In the eyes of Trump's followers, Trump and the rioters fought like hell against a stolen election.

The lefty author believes that Mr. Biden won and is disappointed in Democrats' failure to argue the case for his legitimacy during the second impeachment. This brings us to the most interesting point: why exactly does he believe the election to be both free and fair?  Let him answer in his own words:

The House managers refuse to explain how this was one of the cleanest elections in modern times. I think it was. One of the reasons was because of the expansion of vote-by-mail throughout the country due to covid restrictions. This meant that 90% of the voters were able to cast paper ballots, which created less room for possible problems with the voting machines.

Vote-by-mail also enabled people to vote much more easily. This was a big advantage for Biden and the Democratic down-ballot races.

In retaliation, Trump and his people slowed down post office operations as much as possible, to make sure that many votes never got counted in time. If anyone got cheated, I think it was Biden.

Trump convinced many of his followers that expanded vote-by-mail was the blueprint for stealing an election.

We commentated:

The reason this lefty believes the 2020 election was "one of the cleanest elections in modern times" - chock-full of integrity, no less - was because it was conducted largely by mail, so just about everybody could vote without even having to get up off of the sofa, much less identify themselves as qualified to vote.

That is also precisely the reason we believe the election to have been stolen.

To lefties, "election integrity" means that any old warm, or even slowly-cooling, body can vote, which is why they're trying to scatter illegals into every red state possible; whereas to us and other conservatives of our ilk, "election integrity" means that only bonafide US citizens can vote, and only in the precincts where they actually live.  Yes, we want all eligible voters to be able to vote, but we also want to prevent ineligible ones from voting and harshly punish them when they try.

We regard Democrat's strenuous objections to auditing votes to find out how many are questionable as proof positive that they know that they engaged in questionable tactics to win the election.  If further proof of their addition to cheating were needed, we have their strenuous objections when the Georgia and Texas legislatures passed voter ID laws and other measures to curb "vote by mail" fraud.

Mr. Biden vilified the Georgia law as "Jim Crow 2.0" in spite of it allowing more generous voting hours than his home state of Maryland.  Major-league baseball was pressured into moving the annual All-Star game from Atlanta, where tourism was anticipated to bring nearly a hundred million dollars worth of business to the mostly minority-owned businesses near the Atlanta stadium, to lily-white Denver, Colorado.

The plain truth, clearly evidenced if you bother to read the actual law, is that it caused Georgia elections to be looser than they are in many deep-blue Democrat states.  If that's Jim Crow, then many Democrat-run states are Jim Crow on steroids - no real surprise, since the actual Jim Crow states of days gone by were exclusively run by Democrats, but hardly the point Joe Biden was trying to make.

Not long thereafter, enough Democrats in the Texas legislature fled the state in violation of state law to prevent Republicans from getting a quorum to pass laws closing loopholes for fraud.  Fortunately, this ploy eventually failed, as they had to return home and were frogmarched back to their jobs in the state capitol.  Again, the specific provisions found in the new Texas law was in no way out of the ordinary for many states both Democrat and Republican.

Yet, Democrats seem sworn to oppose any election rules at all, at least in states where they don't already have a complete lock on elected office.

The conflict over clean elections has become so fraught that Hillsdale College, one of the few which forbids students to apply for federal loans, published "Is Ensuring Election Integrity Anti-Democratic?"

As we see it, the fact that this question has to be asked at all is a sign of how far our societal discourse has fallen from reverence for truth.  Hillsdale quoted former President Obama:

"There is an unfolding assault taking place in America today-an attempt to suppress and subvert the right to vote in fair and free elections, an assault on democracy, an assault on liberty, an assault on who we are-who we are as Americans. For, make no mistake, bullies and merchants of fear and peddlers of lies are threatening the very foundation of our country." Sadly but predicable, he went on to suggest that requiring voter IDs would mean returning people to slavery.

Hillsdale reminds us:

Of the 47 countries in Europe today, 46 of them currently require government-issued photo IDs to vote. The odd man out is the United Kingdom, in which Northern Ireland and many localities require voter IDs, but the requirement is not nationwide. The British Parliament, however, is considering a nationwide requirement, so very soon all 47 European countries will likely have adopted this common-sense policy.

... Canada requires a photo ID to vote. If a voter shows up at the polls without an ID, he is allowed to vote only if he declares who he is in writing and if there is someone working at the polling station who can personally verify his identity.

... Up until 1975, France also had loose absentee voting rules. But when massive vote fraud was discovered on the island of Corsica - where hundreds of thousands of dead people were found to be voting and even larger-scale vote-buying operations were occurring - France banned absentee voting altogether.

So we've long known that America is divided roughly 50-50 along the question of who should enjoy the fruits of a working citizen's labor, whether we should be a Democracy or a Republic, and we can't even agree on what is required for a fair election; everybody voting, or only citizens voting.  Is it any surprise that half the country doesn't believe our elections, and thus the legitimacy of the government that rules over them, and hasn't for most of the past 20 years?

Who is to rule us, and how, is a vital question for national peace and unity.  But it's not really the most important question; after all, throughout history the vast majority of people have been ruled by kings who cared not a whit for them or their opinions.

This brings us to the next disconnect, which has become literally a matter of life and death, and we'll examine that in the next article in this series.