What to make of this:
Only half of Republicans would accept Clinton, the Democratic nominee, as their president. And if she wins, nearly 70 percent said it would be because of illegal voting or vote rigging, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Friday.
The majority of Republican voters in this country would feel—before the votes are counted-- that they have been robbed in an election that for all intents and purposes, cannot be rigged or falsified.
This is something new. And it has spawned widespread handwringing by just about everyone in the media. Egged on by a charismatic, ethically challenged reality-TV con-man, a huge swath of the electorate has signed on to the notion that the entire Democratic process this country has spent nearly two and a half centuries to perfect—cannot be trusted. The implications for future elections—and there will be many, many future elections—is staggering.
The media will spend the next two weeks dissecting this phenomenon. So let me add my two cents now, before it is lost in the hurricane.
This election is fundamentally unremarkable. One candidate is qualified, the other has proved himself to be unqualified. The unqualified one has adopted positions and demonstrated personal behavior that is simply antithetical to the majority of the voting age population by any objective measure.
And yet, the Republicans say the process is flawed.
It is not. They are the ones who are flawed.
What is the root of their opposition? To understand that you have to look at the reasons for Trump’s appeal to them in the first instance, the xenophobia, the lashing out, the call to violence. Those attitudes did not appear out of whole cloth. They were nurtured and fed, tended to like a corrupt, malevolent beast locked in the basement and repeatedly denied its due. Its anger is trapped, but the anger is real, desperate to get out and kill everyone in the house.
The fact that these sentiments are arising after the successful two-term Presidency of an African American President is not a coincidence. Neither is the fact that they arose after the largest economic calamity in our country’s history since the Great Depression. All of which happened to coincide with the advent of a communication system enabling like-minded people to commiserate with each other on a worldwide scale.
Much has been made of the so-called economic stagnation afflicting Trump’s base--the fact that they can no longer get ahead in life with a high school education, that they can't find the “American Dream.” But those are problems that permeate all of American society, not just rural white enclaves. I don’t see residents of the inner cities trashing the idea of elections because they can’t keep up with the Joneses. That’s not a good excuse.
When you fill someone’s ears and minds with a non-stop barrage of resentful, whining and bombastic right wing garbage, broadcast day and night on talk radio and a “news” channel created specially for that purpose, and then you multiply it by a factor of ten with the Internet, this is what you get. You get a huge population of paranoids who have progressed well beyond the point of no return. A population that is unthinking, unquestioning and addicted to hatred because it has become the only thing meaningful in their lives. The shared anger is now their “community.”
A population with invented grievances that have no basis in objective reality. A population primed to receive the message of a carnival barker like Trump who preys on their imagined “woes.” And now it’s one eager to throw Democracy itself under the bus.
Some Republicans—the good ones—are horrified by Trump’s suggestion that our election process is illegitimate. But he’s been saying it all along:
“The system is rigged. The voting is rigged. The whole deal is crooked, 100 percent — almost as crooked as crooked Hillary — it’s a crooked deal,” Trump said to massive cheers.
That was April.
He’s also said this:
“Do you ever hear politicians — I mean, you know, they’re just politicians — where they say, ‘Please, please, go out and vote, even if you’re not voting for me. Vote for my opponent. It’s so important as an American exercise for you to go out and vote,’” Trump said in a wheedling, imitative tone of more traditional politicians.
“I’m not saying that,” Trump said. “If you’re going to vote for anyone else other than me, do not go out and vote, OK?”
“Don’t go out and vote! Don’t!” Trump commanded, again to massive cheers.
So a poll that indicates his followers have eagerly swallowed this line really shouldn’t be much of a surprise. What it tells us, more than anything, is that for a huge number of Americans, Democracy has become something meaningless, not to be trusted, and, if necessary, rejected.
Their hate and anger matters more than any pesky notion of “freedom.” In fact, they hate the rest of us for having that freedom. They don’t want a multicultural (or multicolored) world, where others have the same rights as them and can even tell them what to do. They hate the black guy and they hate the woman. The fact that she’s winning is a slap in the face to all of their wounded sense of entitlement, a reminder that they are not exceptional and aren’t entitled to anything extra. That’s just impossible for them to bear, and, most importantly, it’s out of their control. So the election itself, the foundation of our democratic system, becomes an object of scorn and derision, something to be tossed away.
And all the rest of us, standing around and gaping, wonder why.