Stop Marching Into Quicksand: Become a Leftist Election-Denier and Insurrectionist

Don’t get me wrong.

I’m talking about rational and defensible election denial and revolutionary action that relates to how the American system is actually set up and functions.

Right-Wing Gerrymandering

The post-republican “Republican” party claims – and many if its followers seem to actually believe – that the nation’s electoral and governance systems are tilted towards the supposedly awful “radical Left” – towards socialism.

Leaving aside that nothing better for the US masses than could occur than the radical replacement of capitalism with socialism, the claim is absurd. The system is tilted well to the right of the ideological spectrum and majority public opinion in the United States. And – this is a key point – it’s been rigged that way for a very long time, really from the beginning when you get down to it.

There’s been a lot of liberal attention understandably given to recent Republi-fascist efforts to “distort the nation’s democratic voting system” through gerrymandering (the deliberate drawing of electoral districts so as to favor one party over others), voter suppression measures, the intimidation of election officials, and outright lies about voting fraud.

It’s no small matter. Look at gerrymandering, just one of these dark tools. In Wisconsin, for example, Democrats hold nearly every elected statewide office but, as The New York Times reports, “extreme gerrymandering of state legislative maps has given Republicans near supermajorities in the State Senate and House. At best, Democrats enter the state elections in November hoping to perpetuate the stalemate by re-electing their governor, Tony Evers.”  This makes it difficult for Wisconsin Democrats to convince their supporters that voting matters, the Times finds.

Similar stories can be reported from other states.  In Wisconsin, Ohio, North Carolina and Georgia, the Times reports, recent “gerrymandering has ensured that the electorate’s partisan composition need bear little resemblance to that of its Legislature or congressional delegation… Only 2 percent of bills sponsored by Democrats in the Wisconsin State Legislature last session got a hearing, much less a vote.”

Like the fascist Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s recent effort to block ballot access for the disproportionately Black population saddled with the mark of a felony record, gerrymandering is a clear violation of the core democratic principle of “one person, one vote.”

The problem exists beyond the state level. Look at the US House of Representatives.  The Republi-fascist party of right wing election denial and insurrection is likely to regain the agenda-setting House majority next week despite the fact that less one in three (25-30%) US registered voters identifies as a Republican. It isn’t just about voter concerns over the economy, the long historical pattern of the party in White House power losing the mid-term (the only recent historical exceptions are 1998 and 2002), Biden’s low popularity, Biden’s totally predictable and predicted neoliberal failure to stand up forcefully to the challenges of the times  (consistent with his long conservative history including his 2019 promise to elite donors that “Nothing would fundamentally change” if he lucked into the White House), and the preponderant majority of USAers who say the country is “on the wrong track.” It’s also about House district gerrymandering, which also takes place at the (gerrymandered) state level and is permitted under the nation’s reactionary Constitution (more on that childishly worshipped document below!).

The Senatorial Killing Floor: Absurd Power and Malapportionment

But House misrepresentation is nothing compared to the anti-democratic distortion prevailing in other chamber of the US Congress – the Senate. What has the Democrats’ likely short-lived control of the House (2019-2023) garnered for We the People in the nation that calls itself “the world’s greatest democracy?” Very little indeed, thanks in great part to the to the authoritarian killing floor located one chamber up in the legislature.

House Democrats passed seemingly important House bills for enhanced voting rights, labor rights, women’s rights, environmental protection, gun control, police reform, expanded health care, increased pension and welfare benefits and the like (please see my appendix for a list of bills passed by the US House and killed in the US Senate in 2021 and 2022) These measures have significant majority public opinion backing.

But, how to put this… so what? As the Dems know very well, everything or almost everything remotely decent they pass has its throat slit in the Senate. Here is something I wrote on CounterPunch last July 22nd:

“Prediction: House Democrats will soon channel popular rage against the latest spate of mass shootings carried out with assault rifles (led by the massacres in Uvalde, Buffalo, and Highland Park) by passing an assault-weapons ban. The House bill will be shot down by the US Senate… The fact that a preponderant majority of Americans want an assault weapons ban is about as relevant to them as the fact that a super majority of Americans supported the continuation of Roe v. Wade was to the far-right Supreme Court when it reversed women’s half-century constitutional right to an abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson.”

Here’s a Times headline from exactly one week later: “House Passes Assault Weapons Ban That Is Doomed in Senate.”  (There have been more than 200 mass shootings in the US since the Senate shot down the ban.)

Here’s a partial list of bill passed by the US House and killed by the US Senate in the 117th US Congress (January 2021-January 2023):

• The For the People Act (2021): To expand Americans’ access to the ballot box, reduce the influence of big money in politics, and strengthen ethics rules for public servants, and for other purposes.
• The John Lewis Voting Rights Act (2021), to preserve and expand voting rights protections for minorities.
• The Equality Act (2021), to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation, and for other purposes.
• The Bipartisan Backgrounds Check Act (2021), to require a background check for every firearm sale.
• The Protecting America’s Wilderness and Public Lands Act (2021)
• The Protecting the Right to Organize Act (2021), to essentially re-legalize union organizing and empower unions.
• The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (2021)
• The Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act (2021)
• The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act (2021), to hold law enforcement accountable for misconduct in court, improve transparency through data collection, and reform police training and policies.
• The Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act (2021)
• The Build Back Better Act (2021), a bill that combined significantly expanded social protections with positive environmental action.
• The Respect for Marriage Act, passed last July, to recognize same-sex marriages at the federal level.
• The  Women’s Health Protection Act, which would have given health care providers the right to provide abortions and their patients the right to obtain them, invalidating numerous state restrictions enacted in the wake of  Dobbs v. Jackson decision (2022).
• A second House-passed post-Dobbs abortion rights measure would have protected the right to travel across state lines for abortion services.
• The Assault Weapons Ban of 2022.

Why does the Senate function like this? With all due respect for understandable liberal and progressive handwringing over the dollar-drenched corruption of right-wing Demuplican Senators Joe “Coal Mine” Manchin (“D”-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (“D”-AZ) – two nauseating corporate “centrists” who have repeatedly blocked liberal legislation most of the populace – the problems with the Senate go much deeper than two or three right-wing semi-Democrats.

In Senate races as in House contests and every US election from city council up to president, there is of course the US Supreme Court-sanctified (see below) problem of campaign finance – of rich folks paying for increasingly super-expensive campaigns with the understanding that their contributions come with policy strings attached. Beyond that there’s the other cords of capitalist political power: job offers, media control, investment opportunities, the threat of disinvestment, and more (please see Chapter 5, titled “How They Rule: The Many Modes of Moneyed Class Power,” in my 2014 book They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy).

But it’s much worse than all that in the Senate. The US House and the (fifty) state legislative districts may have the anti-democratic gerrymandering problem, but the democratically unnecessary Senate (bicameral legislatures are not normative in modern bourgeois “democracies”) violates the “one person, one vote” principle even more egregiously through an insidiously anti-egalitarian “rotten borough” hitch that makes it into a Minority Rule institution with a vengeance. The nation’s absurdly venerated 1787 charter grossly exaggerates the Senate voice of the nation’s whitest, most reactionary, gun-addicted, racist, and woman-hating fascistic regions by assigning two Senators to each U.S. state regardless of (steep) differences in state population. From a “democracy” perspective, it’s ludicrous on a Monty Python scale: “Red” (Republican) Wyoming, home to 581,813, holds U.S. Senatorial parity with “blue” (Democratic) California, where 39,185,605 people reside. That’s one U.S. Senator for every 19,592,803 Californians versus one U.S. Senator for every 290,907 Wyoming residents. Just one of New York City’s 5 boroughs, bright-blue Brooklyn, has 2,736,074 people. If Brooklyn were a state and US Senators were apportioned there with the same populace-to-Senator ratio as red Wyoming, Brooklyn would have 9 U.S. Senators (all likely Democrats). If liberal California had the same populace-to Senator ratio as Wyoming, in basic mathematical accord with “one person, one vote,” it would have 135 US Senators.

Think about that.  Do the math yourself if you don’t believe me.

Demographic change has helped fuel the distortion. Due to “a growing population shift from the agricultural interior to crowded corridors along the coast,” the brilliant US Constitution critic Daniel Lazare noted five years ago, it had become “mathematically possible to cobble together a Senate majority with states that account for just 17.6 percent of the popular the vote.”

There’s a possibility that the Democrats will lose their tiny Senate majority – already rendered largely ineffective by the de facto Republicanism of Sinema and Manchin – next week. But thanks to the Senate’s longstanding reactionary and procedural filibuster rule (which Democrats make largely disingenuous noise about wanting to repeal), keeping that majority would not matter all that much.  The rule requires 60 of the Senate’s 100 votes for most bills to become laws.

This would be less of an authoritarian problem if the Senate wasn’t an unusually powerful upper legislative chamber, endowed with veto power not just over House bills over US treaties, presidential Cabinet appointments, and federal judicial – including of course Supreme Court – appointments.

So what if more than two-thirds of the US populace supported the continuation of women’s constitutional right to an abortion? The Kill Floor Senate doesn’t represent that popular super-majority. It doesn’t align with the three in five Americans who back an assault weapons ban. It is all too constitutionally tilted towards the most virulently revanchist sections of the country and ruling class.

The Simon Says Supremes and The Democracy-Flunking Electoral College

The profound democratic illegitimacy of US-American government is hardly restricted to the House and the Senate. Also critical is the extreme power of judicial review that is granted to the absurdly lifetime-appointed Supreme Court under an ancient but still intact decision (Marbury v Madison, 1803) – the remarkable “Simon Says” authority to cancel state and federal legislative and executive actions.  far beyond the norm in modern “democracies.” Those who understandably denounce the terrible role that plutocratic campaign finance plays in cancelling US “democracy” (turning US elections into what current House Representative Jamie Raskin and his fellow law student John Bonifaz once cleverly termed “wealth primaries”) would do well to register that the Court has (in Buckley v. Valeo [1976] and Citizens United [2010]) used judicial review to define unlimited corporate election funding as constitutionally protected free speech. Supreme Simon Says!

In the spring of 2019, the right-wing Supremes ruled that federal courts are powerless to hear challenges to partisan gerrymandering. The momentoous 5-4 vote closed the door to future such challenges. Supreme Simons said!

Also relevant is of course the openly antidemocratic absurdity of the preposterous Electoral College, which permitted the pathological fascist malignancy Trump to become the fifth US president (after John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, and George W. Bush) to be installed in the White House after losing the national popular vote. This disgraceful and ludicrous (from a democracy perspective) system (have fun trying to explain it to someone from another country, fellow US-Americans!) renders millions of popular votes superfluous while over-representing the nation’s most right-wing regions and states and absurdly narrowing the real presidential contest to a small handful of contested states.

Five of the nation’s nine Supreme Court Justices — Roberts (George W. Bush appointee 2005), Alito (GWB) Gorsuch (Donald Trump), Kavanaugh (DT), and Coney-Barrett (DT) — were appointed by a POTUS who rose to power after losing the popular vote.

This horrific, far-right Court is in its current session likely to rule – in Moore v. Harper – on behalf of the “independent state legislature theory” (ISLT). This would permit “red” (try brown) state legislatures freedom from state-level judicial review as they send to Congress Electoral College slates that contradict the popular presidential votes in their state. Contested state Republi-fascist parties are currently running extremely viable “election denier” – really election stealer – candidates for state-level executive branch offices with authority over election supervision and certification.  They are doing with the clear intent of violating their statewide presidential votes if “necessary” to guarantee Republi-fascist victory in 2024-25.

Another and neglected aspect of how US politics and policy slant far to the right of the populace is the vast amount of power granted to the fifty states in the holy name of “states’ rights.” People stuck in the nation’s most white, rural, revanchist, fundamentalist, and neofascist states are subject to noxious politics and policies that particularly defy overall national public opinion on one key mater another (abortion rights, gun safety, school financing, welfare levels, labor rights, voting rights, civil rights, intellectual freedom, and…the list goes on).  Red Sate Amerikkka stands way starboard of the country as a whole but gets to conduct itself with vile impunity within its considerable swath of real policy power.  And, of course, what happens in the red states doesn’t just stay in the red states.  It pollutes and sickens the whole national body politic in numerous relevant ways.

Defending this slaughterhouse of popular sovereignty as “democracy” is a sure fire way to advance authoritarian rule. We can abhor the current Republi-fascist war on whats left of US electoral democracy without pretending that what existed before this was was anything like a genuine and functioning democracy. “The surest way of discrediting a political (or any other) idea,” Lenin wrote in 1920, “is to reduce it to absurdity on the pretext of defending it.”

Winner Take All and Low Turnout

The anti-democratic features discussed here are a big part of why a vast swath of the US electorate doesn’t bother to vote – a significant part of how the Republi-fascists get to dominate the nation’s political life despite being supported by roughly a quarter of the populace.  Also relevant in explaining the nation’s lethally dismal voter turnout is the winner-take-all “first past the post” nature of US elections. The absence of proportional representation means that parties whose candidates fail to win a majority or plurality in single-member districts get no presence in elected policymaking offices. Very different from multi-party European systems where 20 percent of a vote means 20 percent of elected legislators and chance to participate in governing coalitions, the winner-take-all regime also feeds a widespread sense of “why bother” when it comes to voting and other forms of political engagement.

It is standard for liberals and progressive to denounce all these antidemocratic Minority Rule features and “bugs” as contrary to “the democratic intentions of our nation’s Founders.”  This is profoundly ignorant.  Democracy, real popular sovereignty, was absolutely the last thing the United States’ militantly propertarian, slave-owning, land-grabbing, Indigenous-clearing, and merchant-capitalist Founders ever wanted to see breakout in the new imperial nation they formed in the 1770s and 1780s. They devised a constitutional blueprint brilliantly crafted to “check and balance” democracy. For all the many and monumental changes in US-American life, society, and politics since the late 18th Century, the “framers’” charter is still working dark magic on behalf of class, race, gender, and imperial oppression – quite an accomplishment as Bourgeois Democracy American Style continues on its 21st Century farewell tour.

We need a new charter, to say the least.

It is long past time for a confrontation with not just this un- and indeed anti-democratic system and the neofascist Republicans who the set-up favors but also with the army of liberal and progressive folks who can’t stop ritually and religiously sheep-dogging[1] the people into the killing confines of a disastrous elections system whose savagely time-staggered major party big money candidate-centered contests long ago became demoralizing spectacles of popular defeat and democratic irrelevance. This goes for electoralist friends like Bernie Sanders, Michael Moore, and other decent-hearted folks who have been sending millions marching into US elecrtoral quicksand for far too long.  Pursuing social justice, democracy, decency, and “revolution” through the US-American elections and party system is like trying to the NBA championship with a rag-tag team of 40-something YMCA gym rats.

We should have no intention of honoring the coming right-wing election outcomes under this ridiculous pretend democracy. It is entirely legitimate under such a regime to plan for the following, from Merriam-Webster:

Revolution

[ rev-uh–loo-shuhn ]

an overthrow or repudiation and the thorough replacement of an established government or political system by the people governed.

Of course, any remotely serious Left’s idea of what revolutionary election-denialism would look like going forward will be quite different from that of our current vastly overrepresented Republifascists.

Note

1. A better metaphor than sheepdog might be Judas Goat. According to Wikipeda, “a Judas goat is a trained goat used in general animal herding. The Judas goat is trained to associate with sheep or cattle, leading them to a specific destination. In stockyards, a Judas goat will lead sheep to slaughter, while its own life is spared. Judas goats are also used to lead other animals to specific pens and onto trucks. They have fallen out of use in recent times but can still be found in various smaller slaughterhouses in some parts of the world.”