Majority Rule Is a Bit of a Constitutional Myth in America

By JIM SMITH

Among the many things we have come to know about American history, thanks to Donald Trump and his allies, is that the United States of America was not created as a democracy or even as a democratic republic. The anti-democratic provisions of the U.S. Constitution have been exploited by the right to assure that minority rule remains our country’s ongoing reality.

The origins of minority rule can be found in the compromises agreed to at the founding constitutional convention, which was called to replace the original “Articles of Confederation,” which were tilted even more toward minority rule. Those articles gave each of the 13 original states one vote and required unanimous agreement to amend them.

The U.S. Senate, which gives equal power — two votes — to every state regardless of population, preserved that undemocratic principle. Thus we have a situation where Wyoming has the same number of votes in the Senate as California, even though the latter has 65 times the population of the former.

With the less populated states having vastly different values and politics than the most populated states, the result is what we have today, where Senators representing 40 percent of the population outnumber Senators representing 60 percent of the population.

This will never change, because the process of amending the Constitution also has at its endpoint a situation in which all states carry the same weight in ratifying any amendment.

The most offensive violation of voting equality is found in the District of Columbia, where 705,000 Americans — more than live in Wyoming or Vermont — have no voting representation in either the House or Senate.

Then, of course, we have the Electoral College created in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, which is anti-democratic in the number of electors assigned to each state. And it gives discretion to each state as to how it appoints its electors. All but two states have adopted a winner-take-all rule for appointing electors, which is about as anti-democratic as it can get.

But wait, there’s more!  The Constitution allows any state, through its legislature, to ignore the presidential vote of its population and send whoever it wants to the Electoral College. Thanks to gerrymandering, most legislatures could go completely against the will of its citizens if it so chooses.

As if the Constitution doesn’t do enough damage to the principle of one person/one vote, the Senate’s filibuster rule makes it impossible to pass critical legislation approved by up to 59 of its 100 members. And that’s a rule which the Senate imposes upon itself. Since no law goes to the President for his signature without a vote of both houses of Congress, the U.S. Senate routinely kills legislation approved by the majority of Representatives in the House and even by the majority of its members.

So here we are. America has a form of government that is less democratic than most countries in the “free world.” And now, as we are learning from the Select Committee on the January 6 Assault on the Capitol, the Republican Party is taking maximum advantage of the Constitution’s anti-democratic provisions to cement minority rule in the United States.

What I haven’t mentioned above is the origin and reasons for the anti-democratic provisions of the Constitution. It was all about white supremacy. The creation of a Senate which gave the southern slave states the same number of votes as the more populous northern states, was all about preserving slavery as a southern institution.

In my July 28, 2022, column (which you can find at www.TalkingTurkey.online)  I describe how the Constitution was written to protect and preserve slavery. There was in fact slavery in all 13 colonies, and the majority of “founder fathers” were slaveholders. The Declaration of Independence expressed some nice sentiments and railed against King George for “making slaves” of colonists, but when it came to forming a government, the colonists chose to protect their own institution of slavery.

We are aware by now that racism is the “original sin” of the United States, and that systemic racism has been and continues to be a factor in our political life. And since any change to our Constitution must follow the rules of that document, we are in fact shackled by it into a future of minority rule.

While right-wing extremists like to brandish their AR-15s (as they did in the Michigan statehouse) and talk of civil war, they could probably relax, because our Constitution and our courts are on their side.

 

We Can Thank Trump for Waking Us, Not Just the Alt-Right

For the past several years I have felt like I was back in college. As a history major, I didn’t learn anywhere near as much about American history, racism, fascism and politics as I have learned over the last six years.

It became clear right away that having a sympathetic figure in the White House emboldened the alt-Right, as demonstrated by the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, but that event in turn woke the rest of us up to the existence of those previously closeted forces in our country. You can draw a straight line from that rally to the events of January 6, 2021.

I remember how Barack Obama’s election in 2008 represented to many the arrival of a “post-racial America,” but now we realize that it simply awakened the sleeping giant of racism, which entered its fullness with the election of Donald Trump just 8 years later.

Those forces are in the minority, but they are highly energized and, thanks to the courts, they have enough military grade weapons to intimidate the rest of us into submission. But will they?

This “course” we’re all taking has a reading list. Books that I’ve read and recommend include: How Fascism Works, by Jason Stanley; Fascism: A Warning, by Madeleine Albright; Too Much and Never Enough, by Mary Trump; White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, by Carol Anderson; Rage and Fear, both by Bob Woodward; Disloyal, by Michael Cohen; A Warning, by Anonymous; and The 1619 Project, by Nikole Hannah-Jones. I could also cite countless articles in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The Guardian.  (When you click on the links for those books, you'll see recommendations of books similar to them, many of which I have also read.) 

So, what have I learned from this course of study? For starters, I gained a far more complete understanding of slavery and racism in America and how both were embedded in the U.S. Constitution. As I learned from The 1619 Project, one motivation for our revolutionary war was to preserve slavery. (See last week's blog post for details.)  I learned how the 13th Amendment, which abolished chattel slavery, provided for inmate slavery, which was utilized by former slaveholders to continue slavery by leasing convicts who were imprisoned for petty or fabricated crimes in Southern jurisdictions. (The 13th Amendment reads, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.”)

I have learned how Trump and his minions have followed the fascist playbook. For most of my life I was puzzled by how middle and lower-income Americans would vote against their own interests, but now I realize that emotional interests can trump financial interests, and that fear of immigrants and persons of color and fear of socialism (undefined, and equated with communism) are proven tools utilized by fascists. The manipulation of working class Americans by Trump (who boasted that he loves “poorly educated” voters) is a textbook case in point.

I also learned from Hannah-Jones’ book that fascist inspiration was a 2-way street.  Hitler’s American Model, by James Q. Whitman, describes how Hitler got inspiration from the Jim Crow racism in 20th Century America.

A 2021 book, When People Want Punishment: Retributive Justice and the Puzzle of Authoritarian Popularity, by Lily L Tsai, addresses this very dynamic. Although China is her case study, the final chapter brings the topic home to our domestic situation.

It’s looking as if we may have passed the “tipping point” when it comes to reversing the effects of climate change. Have we also passed the tipping point when it comes to saving democracy? As you and I have learned in this “course,” the U.S. Constitution allows for state legislatures, so many of which are ruled by Republican election deniers thanks to gerrymandering, to overrule the will of the people.

The U.S. Constitution does not dictate how states choose the slate of presidential electors. This has changed over time, but most states — except Nebraska and Maine — send a slate of electors, all of whom are committed to the candidate who got the most votes, no matter how close the vote count was. The U.S. Constitution does not care how a state’s constitution or statutes determine how its slate is constituted.

There’s a real possibility that those Republican-controlled state legislatures may ignore their state’s popular vote and send the electors of their choice to the Electoral College in 2024. That’s a development we all should fear.

 

 

Supporters of Donald Trump Say They Love America, But That’s an Oxymoron

    I had an “aha moment” last week when a reader who'll I'll call Bradley O. asked if I remembered him. I said, “Yes, you support Donald Trump.”  He responded, “That's right, I love my country,” which frankly pissed me off because it suggested that I didn’t love my country because I don’t support Donald Trump.

 Although he denied that implication, it got me thinking. Is it really possible that a supporter of Donald Trump loves America? In a twisted way, I suppose that’s possible, but let’s analyze what supporting Donald Trump really means.

To support Donald Trump is to support a man who incited insurrection against America because he didn’t accept his electoral defeat. At least his supporters are consistent, because many of them think it’s fine to display the confederate battle flag and to preserve statues of men who mounted actual armed conflict against our country in support of the continued enslavement of African American men, women and children.

Those same people applaud the appointment of “originalists” to the U.S. Supreme Court. An originalist is someone who supports the original intent of the founding fathers, which included the disenfranchisement not only of enslaved people but of women and, it should be noted, of men who didn’t own property.

What version of America do these supporters of Donald Trump love?  It’s not the America I love, which is a land of opportunity for all, not just for a select few. I love the America which welcomed immigrants and no longer imprisons and kills native Americans.

America has always been a work in progress, always striving toward a “more perfect union.”  Trump supporters talk about “making America great again,” but they are really talking about turning back the clock on the social progress that enfranchised women and persons of color (albeit 100 years after passage of the 13th Amendment), that allowed women to control their own bodies, and that recognized the rights of LGBTQ citizens to exist, to express their love for each other, and to be safe.

To support Donald Trump is to support a man whose rhetoric has emboldened white supremacists and racists (including anti-Semites), who he called “very fine people.” To “live and let live” is not part of their lexicon.

True Americans recognize and accept that we are not perfect now and never have been and choose to learn from history instead of ignore or bury it. Yes, our ancestors committed the Sand Creek massacre, the Tulsa massacre, the imprisonment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps, the Tuskegee experiment which involved leaving syphilis untreated in African Americans to see how it damages the human body, and more. Supporters of Donald Trump don’t want our children to know the dark side of our history because it will make them “uncomfortable.”

To support Donald Trump is to support a man who evaded the draft by getting a doctor’s note about bone spurs and derided Sen. John McCain, a war hero, in life and even upon his death solely because Sen. McCain, unlike Vladimir Putin, didn’t like him.

To support Donald Trump, above all, is to honor a man who always puts his interests above those of his country. His decision to downplay Covid-19 because it might hurt his re-election is an example, and it cost countless American lives. He has yet to urge vaccination, despite secretly getting his own family vaccinated. 

 

Are You Prepared for the Death of America As We Know It? The Indicators Are There

 

   Perhaps you, like me, were under the illusion that all we needed to do to rescue America from the Trump disaster was to defeat his re-election bid and restore sanity and integrity to the White House.

That might well have been enough if we had seen a blue wave that severely reduced Republican influence in Congress, and if Trump had accepted the results of the election, but, sadly, we saw neither.

Now there’s talk that the Republican Party, dominated by Trump loyalists, could restore its control of Congress in the mid-term elections, which historically works against the party of the incumbent president.

Polling results which show the majority of Republicans believing that Donald Trump won the election and was only cheated of victory through voting fraud is nothing short of demoralizing for those of us looking to restore confidence in truth, justice and the American way. His followers, who are victims of Donald Trump as much as anyone, are armed and dangerous. They see the government as tyrannically punishing them for a thoroughly justified attempt to overthrow an illegitimate regime on January 6th, and are still plotting a more successful attack.

They will lose if they make another attempt, but the rest of us have already lost, simply because so many Americans think the way they do and would try again to overthrow their own government.

How did we get here and what are the other indicators that we may lose the battle to save America from complete chaos and destruction?

Historians take meaning from the rising wealth gap. Truly “the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer” at a frighteningly historic rate — long a predictor of grass roots rebellion, although Donald Trump has amazingly convinced large segments of the lower income population that he is their champion.

That speaks to another troubling indicator, namely the in-creased level of stupidity and gullibility of the American public. Personally, I can’t think of anything that would piss me off more than discovering I had been conned, lied to and cheated — and Trump has done all three to the white middle class who still support him.

    How did that happen?  The word “white” has a lot to do with it. Recently I read the book White Rage, and I recommend it to anyone trying to understand Trump’s accomplishment in seducing white America into believing his every lie. The subtitle of the book is “The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide.” Here’s a paragraph about it from publisher Bloombury’s website:

As Ferguson, Missouri, erupted in August 2014, and media commentators across the ideological spectrum referred to the angry response of African Americans as “black rage,” historian Carol Anderson wrote a remarkable op-ed in The Washington Post, suggesting that this was, instead, “white rage at work. With so much attention on the flames,” she argued, “everyone had ignored the kindling.”

Only something as strong as deeply embedded racism can cause someone to go against their other held beliefs. That’s why I’ve always maintained that unexpressed racism (or white rage) is at the root of the undying loyalty of Trump’s base. Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz are trying desperately and unashamedly to assume that mantel, but it’s hard to do so when their “first love,” Donald Trump, is still alive and threatening to run in 2024.

What might disenchant Trump’s base from their infatuation with him? We already know that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose a single vote — something I didn’t believe at first — and talking about his celebrity permission to grab women by their privates didn’t do it. Nor did the accusations by 20-plus women that he raped or molested them — far more allegations than are being faced by Gov. Cuomo or even Matt Gaetz. So what could do it?

If Trump is indicted for tax fraud and mortgage fraud, as seems likely, based on already published information, will that have any effect? Probably not.

The good news, of course, is that while Trump may enjoy majority support of registered Republicans, that number is only enough to win the day in deep Red counties and states. It’s hard to imagine him winning the presidency again, nor will allegiance to him by other candidates like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley win them needed votes in the battleground states which rejected Trump this year.

But that’s not comfort enough to feel good about the future of America. I remember one broadcast journalist opining that the worst scenario for 2024 would be that Donald Trump would run, lose and again declare that the election was stolen, thereby launching another attack on America by his militia supporters.

Here are some other indicators which discourage me regarding the future of this once great country.

First, there’s Fox News, which continues to provide a platform for Tucker Carlson and others to knowingly lie and mislead their audience about anything they want in an effort to create an angry anti-government population. The network is owned by the Murdochs, but it might as well be owned by the largest propagators of disinformation before Fox News took that title from them — the Russian intelligence community.

There is a manual for how to destroy a democratic nation, and it was written by the Russians. Near the beginning of the book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, author Jason Stanley makes the point that democracy contains the key to its own destruction under the right circumstances because of its core freedom — the freedom of speech.

The growth of social media has put freedom of speech on steroids, and the Russians and others have wisely taken advantage of social media and the ability to impersonate ordinary Americans to amplify right wing, white supremacist and other anti-government and anti-freedom themes. The central strategy of disinformation is to identify issues of conflict in our society, then impersonate extremists on both sides of the issue. Success is measured by the street violence that occurs when those false voices inspire real persons to go to the streets, hopefully armed, to attack each other.

The gun issue is particularly intractable. The Second Amendment could have used the words “National Guard” instead of “militia” or, conversely, our states could have used the term “militia” instead of “National Guard” and saved America a lot of unnecessary misinterpretation of what the founders intended. The Bill of Rights was written at a time of distrust of central government by the states. The Second Amendment was designed to protect the right of individual states to create armed militias to protect against tyranny by the central government. Hence the term “well regulated.”  With that understanding, now read the text: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

We can take some comfort from the defection of certain mainstream Republicans following the Jan. 6th insurrection, including Mitch McConnell, Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney. Trump’s insults and the death threats from his followers are unlikely to draw them back into the fold.

Another book I strongly recommend is Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.  It recounts the tobacco industry’s effort to discredit the “settled science” that tobacco smoking causes lung cancer. By finding a few scientists who claimed that it wasn’t settled science, they gave ammunition to the tobacco lobby and the politicians they had bought. The same approach is being used today to cast doubt on human-caused climate change. 

 

Joe Biden Is Wrong: Trump’s Refusal to Concede Befits His Legacy

   We all remember 2016, when Donald Trump said he would only accept the election results if he won. So it is no surprise that he won’t accept the election results now that he has lost.

Never mind that it defies the constitution and threatens national security. Trump has provided adequate evidence that he doesn’t care about either.  He only cares about himself and his fragile ego.

My July 2nd “Talking Turkey” reported on Dr. Vincent Greenwood’s psychiatric analysis of the president as meeting most of the 20 criteria of a psychopath. Refusal to accept loss is not one of them, but it is certainly consistent with them. Reviewing those 20 criteria now makes them ring truer than ever. Only two or three don’t apply:

1. Glibness/superficial charm

2. Egocentricity/grandiose sense of self-worth

3. Proneness to boredom/low frustration tolerance

4. Pathological lying and deception/gaslighting

5. Conning/lack of sincerity

6. Lack of remorse or guilt

7. Shallow affect

8. Callous/lack of empathy

9. Parasitic lifestyle

10. Poor behavioral controls

11. Promiscuous sexual behavior

12. Early behavioral problems

13. Lack of realistic long-term goals

14. Impulsivity

15. Irresponsibility

16. Failure to accept responsibility for own actions

17. Many short-term marital relationships

18. Juvenile delinquency

19. Revocation of conditional release

20. Criminal versatility

News Flash: Trump’s a Loser

Yes, Donald Trump is now a loser, whether he accepts it or not. He is even on record saying that he’s a bad loser.

A Nov. 7 Fast Company column by Joe Berkowitz has the simple headline, “Donald Trump is a Loser,” In it, he wrote that Trump has in fact been a loser in many ways (e.g. getting Mexico to pay for his wall) and lists 14 things we will lose with his departure:

1)  The “fascist cruelty of Stephen Miller.”

2)  Acceptance of white supremacy, “making racists feel happy, comfortable and validated.”

3)  Loss of international esteem.

4)  Denial of climate change.

5)  Conversations about building “the wall.”

6)  The “top-down politicization of the pandemic.”

7)  A Trump-dominated news cycle.

8)  Distrust of White House announcements, which typically focus on Trump’s inherent greatness.

9)  Spite “as the prevalent motivating force,” aimed at “making liberals cry again.”

10)  Loyalty to the president as the primary employment qualification.

11)  The concept of “alternative facts”

12)  The idea that the media is the opposition party and “enemy of the people.”

13)  The president as a negative role model for children.

14)  The president’s sense of infallibility, that he can do no wrong.

But this is such a limited list, isn’t it? I can think of several more things I look forward to losing.

1)  “Shooting from the hip” without thinking and without consultation with advisors. Example: Middle-of-the-night tweeting in general, but specifically announcing troop withdrawal from Syria, abandoning our Kurdish allies.

2)  The president thinking he knows it all — more than the generals, more than epidemiologists, more than climate scientists or scientists in general.

3)  The president making policy decisions based solely on the desire to reverse the policy of his predecessor, regardless of whether the policy was a good one.

4)  A president who is a psychopath, unable to express compassion, such as upon the death of Sen. John McCain, calling him a “loser.”

 

Trump Appears Uninterested in Winning Others Over, Content to Energize His Base

In previous columns, I have shared my belief that Trump supporters are unreachable. (They have been labeled “Cult 45.”) One could conclude from watching Trump’s rally in Tulsa that either he believes he can win over the rest of us or, more likely, that he sees electoral success in further demonizing us and thereby energizing his base to turn out for him on Nov. 3.  What he doesn't seem to realize is that his words energizes his oponents to turn out, too.

Rita and I watched his full speech at the Tulsa rally, fascinated as always at how he appeals to that base. But that base may be shrinking. He was understandably furious about the poor turnout, filling only 6,200 of 19,000 seats, but that was an improvement from how he boasted that attendance at his inauguration was the largest ever. (It was in defense of that claim that Kellyanne Conway made her famous statement about “alternative facts” on Meet the Press two days later, setting the tone for his entire presidency.)

We continue to be intrigued by how Trump supporters are able to overlook his lies, dog whistles to the “deplorables,” scorning of allies and flattering of dictators, obscene language and generally despicable behavior. How would you feel if someone you supported (or just liked) was adored by white supremacists, neo-Nazis, racists and the like? (I wrote about Hillary Clinton’s now-famous September 2016  “deplorables” speech last week, when this column appeared only on this blog.)

Like me, you probably know respectable, college-educated professionals who say they like Trump, and I enjoy conversing with them to figure out why. What I usually find is that they like how his tax cuts benefited them financially — as they did Donald Trump himself. 

One such supporter is a friend of mine, a highly successful Realtor whom I’ve known and admired for over a decade.  She said she supports Trump because his tax cuts have benefited her personally. (She’s far more successful that I am, with 59 closings, two of them over $1 million, in the past 12 months.)  She told me she is willing to overlook his negatives because of that, which I find disappointing.

    There’s another group of non-deplorable Trump supporters that surprises me, because it is in our local Rotary club, to which Rita and I both belonged.  I love and appreciate Rotary for  its “Four-Way Test of the things we think, say or do,” which Rotarians recite at every meeting following the Pledge of Allegiance.  It goes like this:

•  First, is it the truth?
•  Second, is it fair to all concerned?
•  Third, does it build goodwill and better friendships?
•  Fourth, will it be beneficial to all concerned?

As Rita and I joined in reciting the Four-Way Test every Tuesday, it occurred to me after Trump took office, that our president’s thoughts, words and deeds would fail that test. We will never forget when a visiting Rotarian leader gave a talk about the Four-Way Test early in Trump’s reign.  During the Q&A part of the meeting, I thought it appropriate, despite the unspoken rule about avoiding politics, to ask the speaker how we as Rotarians should relate to a president who consistently violates all four tenets of the Test.

The following week, I was told by the club president that “several” Rotarians had complained about me asking that question — although not to me directly. The following week four female members of the club, including Rita, all resigned in protest. I stayed on, but only for another year. I believe in my heart that the vast majority of Rotarians are good people who reject Donald Trump’s leadership or lack thereof.

I considered submitting an article to Rotarian magazine raising this issue, but I never did.  I decided — hopefully wrongly — that it would not have been published, because Trump’s 30% base probably includes many Rotarians, and the organization can’t afford to offend them.  I’m happy to raise the subject in print here for the first time. 

I’m disappointed that any Rotarian thinks the Four-Way Test need only apply to them and it’s okay to support others who blatantly violate it, as Trump does every day.

What Values Would You Like to See Reflected in Our Social & Political Discourse?

Like many of you, I have stood by in dismay, watching the decline of civility and the rise of extremism in American society over the past few years.

There was a time — very recently, in fact — when politicians spoke respectfully of their political opponents, when they didn’t assign them crude nicknames, and when they weren’t outright mean to each other.

There was a time when the anchor of the CBS Evening News, Walter Cronkite, was “the most trusted man in America” and factual reporting of events was respected and not discarded as “fake” or “partisan” news.

There was a time when the work of scientists was respected. Indeed, the word “STEM” entered the dictionary as Americans saw the value of promoting science, technology, engineering and math in school curricula.

There was a time when 99% agreement (actually, less than that) among scientists on topics like global warming was considered enough to consider it “settled science.”

Americans fooled themselves after the election of Barack Obama into thinking we had entered a “post-racial” era, but now we realize racism will never die. Instead there are times when it’s not considered appropriate to voice those impulses or put them into action.

The election of Donald Trump was different. Seeing and hearing the President of the United States mirror one’s own thoughts emboldens him or her to express them or perhaps take to the streets with them, as we saw in the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. Thus emboldened, they often go further than the President, such as when the demonstrators chanted, “Jews Will Not Replace Us!” Making matters worse afterwards was when the President said there were “very fine people” among those demonstrators.

What brought this topic to mind for this inaugural edition of this column was a segment on last week’s Bachelor program on ABC, “The Women Tell All,” in which Rachel Lindsay described the hate and death threats which she endured as an African-American celebrity when she was the “Bachelorette.” The black women who were contestants in this season’s Bachelor program nodded their heads in acknowledgement of experiencing similar hatred.

That’s what has been so destructive of the current presidency — the emboldening of racists, white nationalists and others who in years past would have kept those thoughts to themselves and their loved ones, and certainly not acted on them as they so freely do nowadays.

But there’s more.

The President’s baseless demeaning of the mainstream media, abetted shamelessly by Fox News, has not been fatal — the press will survive and thrive after this president is gone — but it has contributed to the emboldening referred to above.

The most serious long-term effect of this presidency, however, will be the four-year hiatus in the national effort to address climate change. This is a president who has given voice to that 1% of climate scientists who are blind to this worldwide threat at a time when action is so critical. Fortunately, cities, states and corporations have understood the threat and are, to an extent, taking up the battle without the White House support they should be receiving.  Let’s hope it’s enough.

From the beginning, most Americans recognized Donald Trump as a narcissist and pathological liar, someone who returned love only for those who loved or pretended to love him through flattery, such as smart ex-KGB officers like Vladimir Putin.

What’s most surprising to me is not just the self-serving Republican enablers who have tied their wagon to Trump’s star, but how many day-to-day Americans see in Trump’s personality something to admire.