David Pepper’s point is so important: these anti-democratic forces arent doing away with elections—they’re quietly reshaping them to guarantee a specific outcome. As he highlights, this approach makes the end result seem ‘legitimate’ on the surface, even when the odds are stacked against the majority.
It’s exactly why I wrote "The Fine Print of Suppression" ( forgottenfiles.substack.com/p/the-fine-print-of-suppression ) a deep dive into how laws like the SAVE Act keep the trappings of an election while cutting off the very channels people need to register and vote. It’s not that we’ll have no elections—it’s that, without vigilance, we’ll end up with meaningless ones. Pepper’s call to engage now couldn’t be more timely.
Truly. And I do wonder if Trump & Co. are running so far behind in polls by 2026 that they are freaked and Trump decides to *delay* the elections indefinitely. Not sure that's as possible in midterms as in a presidential election, but it's been on my mind a lot. It's been done at times by authoritarians around the world.
Yes, I agree, we will have "elections." And yes, I also agree, Trump/MAGA/GOP have no intention of losing them and ceding power. So it's just as you say, with one additional vial of poison. I'll let Esquire's astute Charlie Pierce, tell it, as quoted in my book CODE RED:
<“[G]iven that there is overwhelming evidence of a national campaign to suppress the potential vote through law, why should we not believe there is a parallel effort to influence votes *after* they are cast? Why should we believe that the national campaign to rig an election is purely legal, and not technological? The only reason is that we don’t want to believe it. The will not to believe is the shifting sand beneath the unstable entire architecture of American Exceptionalism.
Because our attachment to the idea is theological, and not empirical, we can look neither at our history nor our politics honestly. Eventually the lies pile up, one atop the other . . . Eventually, the elections become electronic Kabuki. ‘Our elections must be honest, not because we make them so, but simply because they are ours. It will all work out right in the end because this is America, fk yeah, the shining city on a hill.’ Faith eventually undermines reality. We start believing in spirits and incantations. And then we fall, hard.” (at http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/american-exceptionalism-14056595#ixzz2AdeYV3y2).>
Yes, we need to keep engaging, and work all the harder to overcome the increasingly steeply tilted table and the thumbs on the electoral scales. But we shouldn't kid ourselves about the lengths these evil monsters will go to keep their grip on power now that they've seized it.
Well said. If you look at the extent of the intentions of Trump MAGA you are a doom-monger, if you do not look then you will be surprised by the extent they will go to break every rules they can find while manufacturing excuses for themselves.
This is the part of the Paul Weiss email justifying the capitulation which got me thinking not to readily condemn them:
“We were hopeful that the legal industry would rally to our side, even though it had not done so in response to executive orders targeting other firms. We had tried to persuade other firms to come out in public support of Covington and Perkins Coie. And we waited for firms to support us in the wake of the President’s executive order targeting Paul, Weiss. Disappointingly, far from support, we learned that certain other firms were seeking to exploit our vulnerabilities by aggressively soliciting our clients and recruiting our attorneys.”
I agree with everything you say, this is a well researched and above all useful post. Doing all the things you mention are essential, but they will not be enough. If LBJ could send federal employees to segregationist states in the South to ensure voting was not corrupted in the mid 1960s, then Trump can also send his supporters recruited as federal employees to states with small Democrat majorities to ensure elections are corrupted in the 2020s. Election administrators will be threatened with prosecution from a corrupt federal DOJ, and if this fails violence from MAGA thugs. To prepare the way for this Trump has been shouting about anti-MAGA election fraud that does not exist for years. He is not above with the power of the federal government manipulating some state election employees, to ensure there is some evidence of anti-MAGA fraud. In this case there needs to be a back stop of some kind to expose Trump's assault on elections, and a mass movement prepared to defend the Constitution, and to shout to those who swore an oath to it to act on it. There are deep economic forces involved, of inequality as % of GDP not seen since 1930. They know there will be reforms if democracy continues, and they will fight tooth and nail to prevent this by destroying US democracy.
David Pepper’s point is so important: these anti-democratic forces arent doing away with elections—they’re quietly reshaping them to guarantee a specific outcome. As he highlights, this approach makes the end result seem ‘legitimate’ on the surface, even when the odds are stacked against the majority.
It’s exactly why I wrote "The Fine Print of Suppression" ( forgottenfiles.substack.com/p/the-fine-print-of-suppression ) a deep dive into how laws like the SAVE Act keep the trappings of an election while cutting off the very channels people need to register and vote. It’s not that we’ll have no elections—it’s that, without vigilance, we’ll end up with meaningless ones. Pepper’s call to engage now couldn’t be more timely.
Truly. And I do wonder if Trump & Co. are running so far behind in polls by 2026 that they are freaked and Trump decides to *delay* the elections indefinitely. Not sure that's as possible in midterms as in a presidential election, but it's been on my mind a lot. It's been done at times by authoritarians around the world.
Yes, I agree, we will have "elections." And yes, I also agree, Trump/MAGA/GOP have no intention of losing them and ceding power. So it's just as you say, with one additional vial of poison. I'll let Esquire's astute Charlie Pierce, tell it, as quoted in my book CODE RED:
<“[G]iven that there is overwhelming evidence of a national campaign to suppress the potential vote through law, why should we not believe there is a parallel effort to influence votes *after* they are cast? Why should we believe that the national campaign to rig an election is purely legal, and not technological? The only reason is that we don’t want to believe it. The will not to believe is the shifting sand beneath the unstable entire architecture of American Exceptionalism.
Because our attachment to the idea is theological, and not empirical, we can look neither at our history nor our politics honestly. Eventually the lies pile up, one atop the other . . . Eventually, the elections become electronic Kabuki. ‘Our elections must be honest, not because we make them so, but simply because they are ours. It will all work out right in the end because this is America, fk yeah, the shining city on a hill.’ Faith eventually undermines reality. We start believing in spirits and incantations. And then we fall, hard.” (at http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/american-exceptionalism-14056595#ixzz2AdeYV3y2).>
Yes, we need to keep engaging, and work all the harder to overcome the increasingly steeply tilted table and the thumbs on the electoral scales. But we shouldn't kid ourselves about the lengths these evil monsters will go to keep their grip on power now that they've seized it.
Well said. If you look at the extent of the intentions of Trump MAGA you are a doom-monger, if you do not look then you will be surprised by the extent they will go to break every rules they can find while manufacturing excuses for themselves.
This is the part of the Paul Weiss email justifying the capitulation which got me thinking not to readily condemn them:
“We were hopeful that the legal industry would rally to our side, even though it had not done so in response to executive orders targeting other firms. We had tried to persuade other firms to come out in public support of Covington and Perkins Coie. And we waited for firms to support us in the wake of the President’s executive order targeting Paul, Weiss. Disappointingly, far from support, we learned that certain other firms were seeking to exploit our vulnerabilities by aggressively soliciting our clients and recruiting our attorneys.”
I agree with everything you say, this is a well researched and above all useful post. Doing all the things you mention are essential, but they will not be enough. If LBJ could send federal employees to segregationist states in the South to ensure voting was not corrupted in the mid 1960s, then Trump can also send his supporters recruited as federal employees to states with small Democrat majorities to ensure elections are corrupted in the 2020s. Election administrators will be threatened with prosecution from a corrupt federal DOJ, and if this fails violence from MAGA thugs. To prepare the way for this Trump has been shouting about anti-MAGA election fraud that does not exist for years. He is not above with the power of the federal government manipulating some state election employees, to ensure there is some evidence of anti-MAGA fraud. In this case there needs to be a back stop of some kind to expose Trump's assault on elections, and a mass movement prepared to defend the Constitution, and to shout to those who swore an oath to it to act on it. There are deep economic forces involved, of inequality as % of GDP not seen since 1930. They know there will be reforms if democracy continues, and they will fight tooth and nail to prevent this by destroying US democracy.