Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
Well, it’s past noon on the day after the Iowa caucuses, and in the wealthiest nation in the world, which has led the entire globe down the path of IT, AI and all the other meanings of “automation,” the nation’s earliest Democratic Primary apparently still can’t count the votes and allocate the delegates in a reasonable and timely manner.
What’s happening is only going to fuel suspicion of the party, it’s leadership, and not just in Iowa, and if you read what the Daily Kos founder wrote today, you could come away not with his absolution freeing us from conspiracies, but the opposite: the possible (likely?) winner, Bernie Sanders, had the most to lose by the timing and therefore diverted momentum, and Joe Biden the most to gain by blurring every aspect of what really happened. But this is conjecture. Yet it is easy enough to head down that road. And if it is all on the up-and-up, a symptom of take your pick - always “fallen” human nature or America’s late if not post Empire/Exceptional Nation ills and illusions - that’s still bad enough, isn’t it?
So please consider Markos M’s take here: www.dailykos.com/… (Or was this by someone else; the authorship is somewhat ambiguous, but it has Marko’s pic next to byline “Kos.”)
And then to Yves Smith’s withering deconstruction of what it means, along with commentary by Glenn Greenwald and Mark Ames… here: www.nakedcapitalism.com/…
We’re the world’s greatest democracy, whose democratic institutions are in great trouble.
The fitting title is “Iowa, Democrats and Elite Incompetence.” I hope we can learn more about the firm which designed the app, who picked and vetted them.
Here are several of Yves most powerful declarations:
The Democrats have lurched from their self-inflicted wound of the botched impeachment effort to the self-inflicted wound of the embarrassing fail of Iowa caucus result-tallying, thanks not just to the use of a newly-created app that failed in prime time, but also the lack of any sort of fallbacks. The spectacle of a district chief taking an interview on CNN while on hold with the state honchos and getting a hang up on air is a new low:
On one level, this is an illustration of America’s descent into banana republic status. Pundits and the media keep reinforcing American exceptionalist fantasies, our brand fumes of vaunted democracy, yet we can’t even run elections competently. Is is just the grifting, that introducing more tech creates more opportunities for vendor enrichment? Or is it yet more proof that a lot of people in charge really hate democracy and are at best indifferent to doing things right?
It’s not hard to see the Iowa fiasco as an illustration of an even more deeply-seated pathology: elite incompetence. Too many people with the right resumes get to fail upwards or at worst sideways. And remember, unlike our older WASP-y leaders who were a combination of people from the right clubs and self-made men, our current crop of people in charge pride themselves on being the end products of a meritocratic system, as in their claim to legitimacy stems from the claim that they are more talented (gah) than mere mortals and therefore obviously should be in the top slots because they’ll do oh so much better than everyone else.
And it’s the Democratic party, as the representative of the 10% professional managerial classes, that really owns this disease.
These are the first three paragraphs from her column, although in between them there are clips of others commenting on Twitter and so forth.
It’s unbelievable. Like a recurring nightmare hauling us back to 2016.
Best,
Bill of Rights
Frostburg, MD