Category: Elections

Into the Great Unknown

Posted on | by hr | 1 Comment on Into the Great Unknown

What we can say with certainty about the incoming government is that the values it brings into office are antithetical to our own. We know that: it’s a matter of public record, and we understand the fact of it even if we may be unsure of the magnitude of our disagreement. The incoming administration and the new Democrat-controlled Senate will wish to transform the country in ways we loathe. This much is certain.

Beyond that, we don’t really know very much. Systems composed of people are complex, responding and adapting in ways that are hard, often impossible, to predict. Sometimes a single individual, event, or virus can shift the entire political equation in unforeseen ways. We just don’t know; those who speak with certitude about the future demonstrate a lack of wisdom proportionate to their confidence in the predictions they make.

How will the Democrats deal with the deep schism within their own party? Will a 50-50 Senate allow the kind of radical changes many of us fear the Democrats will try to pursue? How long will Biden be able to maintain the fiction that he’s capable of carrying out the functions of his office, and how will his seemingly inevitable departure take place? What will happen in 2022 as a result of what seems likely to be poor decision-making from the Democrats over the next two years? How will our relationship to China evolve and/or deteriorate, given the leverage our adversary quite probably has over Biden’s corrupt and degenerate son?

We don’t know. We could win in a landslide in 2022. The Senate could be stymied by one or two prudent and/or cowardly Democrats who think it wise to avoid doing something so profoundly stupid as packing the Supreme Court, bringing in a new state, or opening the borders. Or they might do everything we fear, and America could be entering a new dark age. For that matter, China could share another virus with us, the next one worse than the current one to which we’ve grotesquely over-reacted.

We don’t know. So the fight goes on.

Don’t burn bridges between yourself and true allies. Find points of agreement on the right and lean into them. Encourage optimism in the face of the unknown. Avoid people who are too quick to accept and preach defeat: they don’t know the future any better than we do, and there’s nothing to be gained, neither strategic advantage nor honor, by surrender.

Be wary of people who argue for strategic losses, who say it’s better to lose the next fight because it sets us up to win later. The future becomes exponentially harder to predict as it recedes in time and as the chain of events lengthens. Fight for the most conservative plausible win in every case, because we really don’t know where a loss will take us. Keep it simple: try to win each battle as it comes up.

Most Americans hear only one side, that of a smug technocratic left ignorant of history and consumed with hubris. It is up to conservatives — people like us — to expose normal Americans to the facts and ideas they won’t otherwise hear, but that they will usually find persuasive because conservatism is closer to the truth, closer to what actually works and has been shown to work.

So now we go into the unknown together. And there are a lot of us.

We The People are failing our Government

Posted on | by hr | Leave a Comment on We The People are failing our Government

Airplanes fly because the people who design them understand physics. They know how pressure changes as air flows over a curved surface. They understand lift and drag, and how force and mass relate to each other to determine acceleration. They’re experts in the science of materials, in finite element analysis, in instrumentation and control systems and combustion and ten thousand other arcane details of science and design and manufacture.

None of this means that they get it right every time, as Boeing’s recent travails remind us. But they get it right often enough to make air travel the safest means of transportation.

Imagine for a moment that all those aeronautical designers and engineers were hired by people who knew nothing about aeronautics, and who were neither competent to evaluate the resumes of their potential hires nor to evaluate the work done by them once they were hired — and, worse, that the candidates for the positions knew that their interviewers were clueless. How would that affect the quality of the men and women employed? How would it affect the viability of air travel once a generation or two of wholly unvetted “engineers” had been allowed to fiddle with the existing designs?

Our founders gave us a government. It is a complicated yet elegant machine composed of interlocking parts intended to work simultaneously in concert with and opposition to each other. It was created by men who were experts in the theory and practice of government, men who had diagnosed the failures of numerous prototypes and, based on those diagnoses, designed a new form of government, a constitutional democratic representative union of independent states: a republic with formal restraints on both the reach of the government and the whims of the people.

We the people are tasked with hiring the men and women who staff the critical positions in that government. If we know little of how our government was intended to function, we have no sound basis for evaluating the people we vote into office nor the policies they propose. Today there is ample evidence that we are a nation of civic ignoramuses. How many understand what the much-maligned electoral college is, how we got it and why it’s important? How many understand the damage done by the 17th Amendment to the carefully balanced tension between the House and Senate? How many are equipped to see the sheer lunacy of the Green New Deal’s call for a broad usurpation of our rights as citizens? How many understand even the idea of a constitutionally limited central government that is not merely prevented from performing certain tasks, but rather that is constitutionally authorized to perform only a small number of specific tasks?

We are failing to provide a competent civics education to our children, and have been for generations. We have a population ignorant of the most basic aspects of government but which we nonetheless exhort to vote, as if merely standing in the booth were the totality of civic duty. A large proportion of the electorate has the legal right to vote, but lacks the moral standing to do so because it knows nothing about the thing for which it has a sacred duty of stewardship.

We can not blame the children for the failures of their teachers, who themselves know next to nothing about the nature of our government. I don’t know what it will take to trigger a rebirth of pride and interest in our nation’s history and in the framework on which it was built and the ideas behind it. But if we reach the point where we’re analyzing the wreckage following the crash, it will be too late.

Collusion and Obstruction: Two Different Kinds of Crime

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If the President had been found guilty of Russian collusion — that is, of participating in a criminal conspiracy with the Russians to undermine our election — then it would have indicated that he is a particular kind of villain. It takes a particular kind of villain to knowingly work with our enemies to subvert the democratic process. That represents a treasonous betrayal of our country.

On the other hand, being oafish and ignorant of the nuances of executive authority in the context of a legal investigation, while it may arguably appear to meet the legal definition for a charge of obstruction of justice, need not suggest that the President is a villain. Rather, it may simply indicate that he is an amateur on matters of law and politics, and that he is accustomed to speaking his mind without considering the unique legal implications of doing so while the head of federal law enforcement.

I never thought the collusion charges made much sense, and Mueller’s finding that no collusion occurred surprises me not at all.

As to obstruction, I find it much more plausible that the President expressed his frustration at what he rightly considered a relentless and unjustified witch hunt that was undermining his administration, and that he explored various avenues for putting an end to it — but that, finally, he both allowed the investigation to continue and cooperated with it. We know that he resisted the temptation to invoke executive privilege, even when he might plausibly have done so.

I understand his frustration. I appreciate his transparency. I particularly appreciate the people who counseled him to let the investigation run its course.

I think it’s time his critics stepped back and considered the possibility that they’re trying to trap a normal person in a web of legal technicalities in an effort to undo, by hook or by crook, the result of a legitimate election that happens to have led to an outcome they find offensive.

Trump2020: A Response to One Objection

Posted on | by hr | 1 Comment on Trump2020: A Response to One Objection

One objection to re-electing President Trump in 2020 is that, because he exhibits so many of the personal traits which conservatives have traditionally condemned, his election by Republicans casts the latter as hypocrites and removes character as a dimension on which future Republicans can differentiate their candidates from those of the Democrats.

While I made this argument during the primaries leading up to the 2016 election, I think it is no longer relevant. Republicans have already elected Trump; failing to re-elect him will not in any way redeem Republicans. We live in a hostile, left-leaning media environment, and there is no voice on the left that will speak well of Republicans for rejecting President Trump in 2020. That would require a degree of charity the left is completely unwilling to extend.

Whatever damage to the moral standing of Republicans that the election of President Trump can do has been done, and nothing will reverse it or make it significantly worse. Those who think otherwise are crediting the left with more grace than there is any reason to believe it possesses.

I continue to believe that, on balance, the arguments in favor of re-electing President Trump remain compelling.

Skynet and Paper Ballots

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“The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.” – A T-800

Not surprisingly, Skynet objects and destroys most of humanity. This is usually what happens when sentient computers are given life-or-death authority over all of mankind. The good folks of Cyberdyne should have seen it coming: the same thing happened way back in 1970 when Charles Forbin’s attempt at achieving pax cybernetica led to the immediate subjugation of humankind by his Colossus supercomputer (in what is, incidentally, the best computer-takes-over-the-world movie yet made).

The lesson should be clear: don’t trust computers, and certainly not with anything as important as the nuclear arsenal.

And don’t trust them with our elections, either.

Now of course we needn’t be concerned that our voting kiosks will become self-aware and declare war on the electorate. That’s silly. What isn’t silly, however, is the potential for fraud, corruption, and espionage, and the near certainty that widespread electronic voting will undermine, and deservedly so, confidence in the legitimacy of the vote.

Trust in the integrity of the electoral process depends on the electorate’s confidence that a proper chain of custody can be maintained over ballots, and that contested results can be audited, recounted, and confirmed. Even with those assurances, one can be excused for doubting the veracity of the results in problematic districts. What is essential is that we have a reasonable confidence that the overall process is fair and honest, and that the ultimate outcome reflects the will of the electorate.

What is essential is transparency. Unfortunately, transparency is precisely what’s lost when ephemeral software replaces paper ballots.

Consider the disputes that arise from something as seemingly simple as the handling of paper ballots, where the physical items can be counted, sealed into boxes, and observed as they move from one location to another and ultimately into secure storage from which they can be summoned for recounting should the need arise. Even this entirely observable and comprehensible process is subject to both deliberate and accidental corruption, as we discover again every election season.

What does that process look like when voting is done by computer? It looks like binary word shifts and bitwise xoring, finite field multiplication and modulus operators and countless loops through increasingly scrambled cyphertexts. It looks like math, stuff that only a relative handful of software people (and we’re a notoriously geeky, math-enthused lot) can follow.

Those inclined to embrace conspiracy theories (and that includes virtually all of the mainstream media) have spent the last two years in a tizzy over the possibility that Russia subverted the 2016 election using YouTube and Facebook; a comprehensive investigation and its voluminous negative results are unlikely to quell their concerns.

Imagine if the claim were that a hostile foreign power such as Russia or China — or, if you’re a progressive, Israel — interfered with a computerized election. Imagine the complexity of the forensics, the difficulty of determining what went wrong, and the near impossibility of conveying the findings in a comprehensible way to a skeptical public. Any remotely plausible claim of a digitally hacked election would permanently taint the outcome in the public’s imagination; no amount of arcane expert opinion would convince the losing moiety of the election’s validity.

Most electoral changes that have, as their ostensible motive, improved efficiency and increased ballot access work against the integrity of the voting process. Early voting, extended voting hours and days, mail-in ballots, absentee voting, provisional ballots — all of these make it harder to secure ballots and maintain a clear chain of custody, and invite fraud and abuse. Widespread computerized voting will, if implemented, open the process to vote tampering and election rigging by means cryptic and obscure, and on a scale impossible with paper ballots.