Pushing back at Damon Linker

Damon Linker is a good, conscientious centrist writer. His articles appear regularly in The Week, and I read him, learn from him, and agree with most of what he says.

A recent piece by Linker in The Week goes off the rails badly.

Epistemologically, it is a serious matter to disagree with a trusted source. Each of us relies heavily on experience when deciding whether or not to believe someone, and a source who has been right often in the past ought be trusted when they say something new.

Linker has authority in my mind because I’ve read his work often and found it persuasive. I’ve accepted new ideas from Linker, and I’ve changed my opinion because of his evidence and arguments. His convictions are grounded in Christianity, as mine are. So I have plenty of reason to trust his judgement.

But in this particular, he violates such an obvious principle, and violates it so largely, that I’m confident saying he’s wrong. I don’t mean he’s wrong altogether, of course. A lot of what Linker says in “Democrats must bow to the Electoral College” is agreeable. He starts out saying something fundamental and impeccable:

One mark of liberal-democratic government is the smooth, regularized transfer of power from one party to another after rule-based free and fair elections. This achievement is made possible by broad-based trust in democratic institutions and the widely shared perception of the legitimacy of the electoral process.

Roger that.

But then Linker goes on to demand that Democrats prepare themselves to accept a Trump victory. Other commenters anticipate violent reaction from the right if Trump loses. Linker tells the Democrats that they, too, need to be ready to accept a loss.

[A] loss would be incredibly painful for the party. But would it be illegitimate? Evidence that the system is rigged against the Democrats? Justification for going outside the system by refusing to concede? No. What it would be justification for is starting a movement to abolish the Electoral College or institute a work-around to ensure that the candidate who wins the popular vote receives the requisite electoral votes to win the presidency. I support all of that. But strongly favoring those reforms is quite different than saying that in the meantime Democrats get to reject the outcome of elections when the rules they've accepted for more than two centuries deliver results they don't like.

 Linker insists that Democrats ought to accept the outcome of the 2020 elections because the election abides by “rules they've accepted for more than two centuries.” Is that true? Have the conditions that will determine the outcome of the 2020 presidential election prevailed unaltered for two centuries? The pandemic, increased reliance on early voting, the critical role of the underfunded postal service, and Trump’s contempt for historic norms are all new. The knowledge that foreign governments are using social media to dirty the national debate is new. So I think Linker has glossed over some meaningful detail.

EDIT (9/24/2020): I neglected to mention perhaps the most profound new circumstance in the 2020 presidential election. A national court order preventing voter harassment expired in 2018. In 2020, for the first time in most voters’ memory, there are no clear limits to the dirty tricks one political party can use to confuse, discourage or frighten away voters for the other side.

Setting aside the special considerations of 2020, the ordinary rules governing political outcomes are well summarized by Linker himself in the quotation I cited earlier. Broad-based trust in democratic institutions plus rule-based free and fair elections should lead to smooth, regularized transfer of power. It can be expressed in a simple formula:

TRUST IN INSTITUTIONS + FAIR ELECTIONS = SMOOTH TRANSFER OF POWER

We all learned in high school algebra that when you change one side of an equation, there must be an equal change on the other side, too. If A + B = C, then ~A + B <> C. Not A plus B will not equal C.

I have written elsewhere that doing different things and expecting the same results is insanity. Linker makes that mistake here. He expects a smooth transfer of power after the 2020 presidential election even though the known prerequisites for a smooth transfer are absent. American citizens don’t trust the federal institutions and the 2020 presidential election is likely to be unfair.

Linker is profoundly right is urging Democrats to respect democracy. He is profoundly wrong in insisting that the 2020 presidential election is an an exercise in democracy. “Voting” is not the same as “democracy.”

Americans tend to fetishize the act of voting. They forget that elections are common throughout the world. People vote in almost every country. In the darkest days of the Soviet Union, the cheloveks and tovarishes flocked to the polls at every opportunity. Stalin insisted to the world that Soviet elections were more fair than American elections because his system allowed (compelled) literally every man and woman throughout the Soviet Union to vote for him, while the American system threw up severe obstacles to keep certain citizens from exercising their rights.

Hitler took power in 1932. In 1936, Nazi Party candidates won 98.8% of the vote in the German parliamentary elections. I lived in Liberia, West Africa in the mid 80s when military strongman Samuel K. Doe was mismanaging that country. There were comically corrupt elections in 1985. Doe packed the nation’s legislature with his friends, even appointing tribal allies to represent districts they had not run for. It was gross abuse of power. But voting happened.

These three examples suffice to distinguish “voting” from “democracy.” Democracy can happen through voting if elections are fair and open and if citizens have real choices — including at least one candidate that genuinely appeals to them. But voting is consistent with the worst sort of tyranny, too. And elections don’t need to be wholly corrupt to be unfair and illegitimate. Democracy can be thwarted by an election that is just a little bit unfair.

In defense of unfair elections, Linker gaslights the 2016 presidential election. He wants us to remember Trump emerging as the just winner despite improper maneuvering by Democrats.

[T}he Democrats ran up the popular vote with lopsided victories in a handful of very liberal high-population states while falling just short of carrying a handful of more culturally conservative states in the rust belt and upper Midwest.

No. The Democrats did not “run up the popular vote.” That would have required party control of the sort that Stalin or Hitler had in their time. What happened in 2016 was that a number of American citizens (exactly 136,669,276) cast their vote for the candidate of their choice – each  in the community where they lived at the time. Voters in California and New York and other “very liberal high-population states” didn’t “run up the score.” They cast one vote per person, just like citizens everywhere else did.  Not one single individual voter in any jurisdiction — “very liberal high population” or otherwise — engaged in deliberate running up of the popular vote. They were all just voting.

Describing the process as Linker does implies that the national popular vote is illegitimate.

I am sure Linker wrote his column to discourage progressives and liberals from resorting to violence. He is following in the very respectable footsteps of Edmund Burke, who insisted that the status quo ought to be preferred most of the time. Burke would not discard a decently workable process without giving it fair consideration or until a better alternative was clearly in mind.

But extending that good conservative principle to defend a clearly and consistently corrupt institution like the American presidential selection process is taking Burke too far. We already know that the Electoral College is an abomination and the winner-take-all method of apportioning state votes is terrible. Those very issues were highlighted a few years ago by two of the nation’s top constitutional law experts as the stupidest elements of the American system. (Click the link and read the sections by Amar and Rosen.)

We already know the better solution. Direct popular voting for president would be simple and fair. The small-population states have a reason to demand protection from being railroaded by the large ones, but that defense is provided through the Senate.

Linker takes a reasonable position against an impulsive, violent reaction to a Trump victory in November. None of us wants to wake up on November 5th to the smell of smoke and tear gas. But a much stronger protest than Linker would allow might be called for. He suggests “starting a movement to abolish the Electoral College.” Well, people have been trying to do that for at least 50 years. It didn’t happen then and it hasn’t happened since because members of the political class — including many journalists — enjoy their apotheosis too much to jeopardize it. We are long past “starting” an effort to fix the defects of 1787. It is time to get ‘er done.

Democratic Party members might (as Linker suggests) console themselves that another presidential election is coming 2024. But individual American citizens (who Linker neglects in his article) who have been cheated and disregarded and denied repeatedly have no reason to wait until 2024 knowing they’ll get cheated again.

Linker is right that liberals and progressives should not resort to impulsive, wanton violence if Trump wins. He is wrong that the proper course of action is tamely renewing efforts that have already failed. Between the extremes of passivity and impulsive violence lie reasonable but effective possibilities. Citizens should prepare to do what it takes to succeed.