My Election Nightmare

We have record-breaking participation in the 2020 election.  Democrats, being more reluctant to expose themselves to the virus, choose overwhelmingly to use the mail to cast their ballots.  Democrats, being unfamiliar with the process and not particularly good at reading instructions, make errors in completing the ballots.

On election day, the interim count shows Trump and his fellow Republicans running ahead in most states, including the battleground states.  But most states will take days to process and count the mail ballots. As the count proceeds there is a very high rate of ballot rejections, and Democrats become more and more concerned.  

When the dust settles, Trump is reelected based on accepted ballots.  Post-election analysis shows that 7 million ballots from registered Democratic and independent voters have been rejected.  Trump's margin of victory is -2.8 million votes, better than his 2016 margin, but the improvement is entirely attributable to mistakes in the mail ballot process.

Oh, in my really bad nightmare, in several key states there's a Florida-2000 style recount, reviewing the rejected balllots. 

On Changing the Political Rules

I'm reluctant to see political rules changed.

• when you change them for political advantage, you give your opponents a rationale to do the same.  It's called a "race to the bottom".
• often you can't predict the result.

I gather the Democrats will likely do away with the filibuster in the Senate if they gain a solid majority.  I'm not clear that the conservative Dem senators would go along if the votes of Manchin and Sinema were needed.

They may try to do something with the structure of the judiciary, given the games McConnell et. al. have played over the last 5 years.

I'd rather see the Dems work harder, donate more, and win longer and bigger than take the political risks of changing rules.   

But then, I'm a rather conservative liberal Democrat I suppose. 

A Modest Suggestion--Trump Hotel as Dormitory

Louis Gohmert sleeps in his office, a fact mentioned in an article on his contracting coronavirus.  That's not unusual.  This article estimates up to 100 members of Congress do so.

Over the years there have been many articles bemoaning the decline of civility and bipartisanship in Congress, often attributed to the idea that members commute back to their districts on the weekend and don't develop close personal relationships with members of the other party.

Presumably the members who sleep in their offices are usually the ones who are commuting back home--they don't feel the need to rent quarters in DC when they're only sleeping here 2-3 days a week for 40  weeks.

A third fact: the Trump Hotel in DC  hasn't been doing well with the pandemic.  Once Trump is out of office, it's likely to do much worse than it did in 2017-19.

So my modest suggestion:

Let the US  government buy out Trump's lease on the building and set it up as a dormitory for members of Congress. By housing 250 or so members it should create a better atmosphere in Congress, and it helps get Trump back to NYC the evening of Jan 20.

Diversity Now and Then

I was struck by this tweet the other day:

The suburbs are actually a lot more diverse than NIMBY-in-Chief Trump seems to realize. NIMBYism is still partly about racism, but to an increasing degree it's about classism too.https://t.co/yxOeDJIpW7

— Noah Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) July 29, 2020

Back in the 1950's and 60's suburbs were often seen as white, because the narrative was evil realtors were using "block-busting" tactics to get whites to sell their city homes for low dollars and flee to the suburbs while they turned around and sold the homes to blacks for high dollars.

With that narrative, anyone moving to the suburbs was "white", regardless of whether they were moving from a formerly Italian, Polish, Jewish, Irish, or whatever neighborhood.  With a different narrative we could have seen the suburbs as diversifying since they were, I believe, the site of mixing of ethnicities into "white Americans". 

But suburbs weren't "integrated", in the terms used then.  A number of prominent blacks have in their history the memory of being the "first" black family on the block. 

These days we say the suburbs aren't "diverse", by which we tend to mean they're segregated by class--typically a subdivision has only a limited range of prices, meaning it is affordable to a group of families limited by their income.  I think in most areas the middle income suburbs are integrated--they've a small number of "minority" families living in them, but not a great diversity.  At least in the DC area, that description might apply to the black-majority neighborhoods in Prince Georges, or the smaller Hispanic, Korean, or other ethnicity areas scattered around the Beltway.

The rule seems to be, if you have the money, groups with the greater feeling of identity (often more recent immigrants) will tend to buy in the same area, while a minority will go elsewhere. If you don't have any feeling of ethnic/racial identity, you buy wherever, usually based on the school system if you have or are going to have children.

Capitalizing "Black" and "White"

The Post announced today it would capitalize "white". This follows on the Times and AP deciding to capitalize "black". 

My gut reaction is opposed to both changes, particularly the "white".  But I'm not sure I've a rational basis for my objection.  Our designations for other racial groupings are capitalized: Asian-Americans, Latino/Hispanic Americans, African Americans; Pacific Islander Americans, Native Americans.  To be consistent in my opposition don't I have to come up with substitutes for those groupings.

I'm not sure, top of my head, of the difference between African-American and black--I know there's a perceived problem in distinguishing between immigrant African-Americans and antebellum African-Americans but does the black/African-American terminology handle that distinction?  (Personally I think the perceived differential might point to an important dimension in American culture, but that's an issue for another post.)

I guess my reaction, as shown in a tweet this morning, is concern over reifying differences.  To me "black versus white" is different than "White versus Black".  A George Floyd demonstration which includes "Blacks" and "Whites" feels different than a "black and white" demonstration (though I suppose a careful writer might say "biracial protesters" or something similar, which leads to the possibly that forcing writers to capitalize "Whites" will drive some to avoid the racial designation entirely.

Another part of my reaction might be discomfort at being forced to consider myself as part of a racial group, rather than assume membership in the majority culture (at least as U.S. is currently constituted).

Testing Coronavirus Vaccines and Getting the Shots

Oddly I find myself being confused about the vaccine.  If I were approached to participate in Phase III test of a vaccine, I'd likely agree.  Why?  It would be a contribute to the safety of humans.  That's good.

But when the vaccine has been tested and released, I won't be the first one to get it.  Why?  For the same reason I wouldn't rush to buy version 1.0 of software.  That's not particularly logical.  The Phase III trial would have identified any known side effects and proved its safety otherwise.  It's possible that there might be rare effects that are found only when millions, not thousands, are vaccinated.  (There was a flap in the 1970's over a flu vaccine, but it seems that after some years the fears weren't well founded.) 

The difference is that in the second case I'm acting mostly in my own interest.  The community will benefit from my being vaccinated, but that's a minor benefit compared to my participation in the trial.  So the risks to me of being vaccinated are the same in either case.

Can We Sing "Amazing Grace" Anymore?

In today's environment, "Amazing Grace" points two ways:

1. On the one hand, it was written by a man who actively participated in enslaving and transporting enslaved people from Africa to the Americas.  (I knew this, but until I looked him up today I didn't know that he himself had been enslaved, although only for months, not a lifetime.) 
2. On the other hand, its message is one of forgiveness and redemption of sins.

IMHO the way to reconcile is to believe that humans are prone to error (my Calvinist forebears would say "original sin"), but change and redemption can happen, whether by God's grace or otherwise, and we must accept all humans as human.

Gorbachev and Other Leaders

Just finished reading William Taubman's Gorbachev.  It's a good book, as a winner of the Pulitzer should be.  The  focus is, of course, on political history.  I don't remember any great surprises that weren't fairly clear in the newspapers of the time, except for the closeness of Mikhail and his wife and family.  Yes, he faced a lot of opposition over the years, from both liberals who wanted to go further and differently and conservatives who didn't want to change the system in which they had prospered. Yes, he maneuvered back and forth first to rise to power and then to maintain his power while trying to move  the country towards his goals, which turned out to be a liberal social democracy (though that seems to have been a post facto realization.

Taubman writes well, seems to have interviewed those Soviet figures still living, and doesn't force his conclusions.  He reports differing assessments from friends and foes, including a number of people who began as allies and ended disappointed and disaffected.

I, as I suspect most American readers would be, was most interested in his foreign policy and  dealings with other world leaders.  He got on well with his counterparts, from Thatcher and Reagan, Mitterand and Kohl, to Bush.  The glimpse of Thatcher through Soviet eyes was particularly interesting. Taubman's assessment of the Bush approach to Gorbachev is mixed: Bush's personality and upbringing meant he eased Gorbachev's way, but it also meant he perhaps missed a chance to push events in a better direction, one which might have averted our current state of hostility between Russia and the U.S., but who knows?

Allying With Stalin

Matt Glassman has a nice reply tweet this morning apropos calls for political purity: we allied with Stalin to defeat Hitler.

To me it's a two-fold reminder: 

• there's no purity in human beings, we're all a mixture of qualities. Stalin was an evil man but effective enough as a wartime leader. 
• our decisions are made in time.  As Churchill said; I'd ally with the devil to defeat Hitler.

Who Calls Whom a Bitch?

Lisa Lerer has an article in today's Times discussing the use of the epithet in politics, given Rep. Yoho's use in connection with Rep. AOC..  A lot of discussion of its use against Hillary Clinton.   But I'm old enough to remember the "grandmother of the nation" somewhat delicately using it against the first woman on a major party's national ticket.

Yes, I'm talking Barbara Boss and Geraldine Ferraro, as described in this NYTimes piece.