Three Days in November
Why will we win? Because democracy is a home game for Americans.
Welcome to The Experiment, the weekly newsletter for finding our way through the Uncertain Now. This week I discuss what we do when they stop counting the votes in “Three Days in November.” Frank Spring returns with “As I Was Going Up The Stair, I Met a Campaign That Wasn't There,” which is a pleasure to read. Rachel Megan Barker writes about how the pandemic has and has not changed her relationship in “Long Distance in the Time of Corona.” Jack Hughes reminds us whoever wins in 2020 faces the Curse of Tippecanoe in “Tippecanoe and Agnew Anew.” And in this week’s installment of Red Ticket, Robin Whetstone tells the absolutely bonkers and (as far as I can remember) absolutely true story of how we went on strike against our Russian publisher when he stopped paying us to avoid taxes in “Crime and Punishment.”
And as always, we remember who we’ve lost and offer recommendations on what to do, read, watch, and listen to, including a recently rediscovered and previously recording of a 1962 concert Ella Fitzgerald gave in Berlin. It’s not the Falco concert in Vienna I went to in 1987, but it’ll do.
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But first, have you ever heard of Eric Hoffer?
Eric Hoffer was the son of immigrants from Imperial Germany. He was five when his mother took a tumble down a staircase with him in her arms. She died, and the injury left him partially blind. When he was 15, his sight returned. He began to read as much as possible because he worried about losing his eyesight again. That never happened, but he kept on reading. In fact, he read so much that he took a union job as a longshoreman in San Francisco because it afforded him more time off to read.
In 1951, Harper & Row published his first book, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. The book established him as a moral and political philosopher at a time when the world was still trying to make sense of national socialism and communism. He wrote nine more books, but The True Believer was his big hit. Dwight Eisenhauer gave copies to his friends and quoted the book in one of the first televised presidential press conferences. Ronald Reagan gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983.
His thesis on mass movements is essentially this:
“A movement is pioneered by men of words, materialized by fanatics, and consolidated by men of action.”
In 2019, my friend Peter gave me The True Believer to open my eyes to what was happening. Trumpism was a mass movement led by an aged foghorn who convinced disaffected Americans that they were “part of something mighty, glorious and indestructible.” The parallels to Stalin and how Trump emasculated his own apparatchiks were chilling.
In his purges of the old Bolshevik leaders, Stalin succeeded in turning proud and brave men into cringy cowards by depriving them of any possibility of identification with the party they had served all their lives and with the Russian masses.
Sound familiar? By turning the Republican Party into a cult of personality, Trumpism has become the animating force driving most Republican elected officials and uniting Republican voters. The top issue for Republican voters in primaries is whether the candidates are loyal to Trump. Also, requiring people to wear masks in a pandemic is seen by many Republicans as criticism of the Dear Leader. Liberals get hung up on how wrong everyone is about the science behind the coronavirus. True, 90% of what the man says is fetid balderdash. But if we drop our smartypants and accept that what we are witnessing is really happening, then we can begin to deal with the fact that the President has turned much of American government into the machinery of a mass movement without ever once having the support of the majority of this country. What Eric Hoffer saw in his analyses of Naziism and Stalinism is what we are seeing the beginnings of with Trumpism.
OK, OK, take a breath. First, I only said the beginnings of Trumpism. And second, I don’t want to spoil the conclusion, but this is America, and we believe in happy endings.
But it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
In June, a bipartisan group of more than 100 current and former senior government officials, senior campaign people, journalists, and assorted experts took part in a series of role playing games. They played out four different scenarios of the 2020 election: the results are too close to call on election night, Biden wins the popular vote and the Electoral College by a clear margin, Biden wins both by a narrow margin, and Trump wins the Electoral College but not the popular vote. They called this the Transition Integrity Project. Think of it like Dungeons and Dragons for politicians, and in this one the dragons are real.
The results of all four table-top exercises were alarming. We assess with a high degree of likelihood that November’s elections will be marked by a chaotic legal and political landscape. We also assess that President Trump is likely to contest the result by both legal and extra-legal means, in an attempt to hold onto power. Recent events, including the President’s own unwillingness to commit to abiding by the results of the election, the Attorney General’s embrace of the President’s groundless electoral fraud claims, and the unprecedented deployment of federal agents to put down leftwing protests, underscore the extreme lengths to which President Trump may be willing to go in order to stay in office.
The Transition Integrity Project issued its report in August to predictable reactions. The analysis that Trump will contest the results of the election, make unfounded accusations about voter fraud, and incite violence was taken as proof of “the left's TERRIFYING game plan to RADICALLY change America,” said Glenn Beck.
“Is the left setting the stage for a coup if Trump wins?” asked Fox News.
There is a lot to admire in telling a lie with such verve. This is a bigger lie than blaming a rape survivor for dressing provocatively. This is like saying a woman who carries a canister of mace while walking through a parking garage at night is in fact planning to rape an innocent man who just happens to be wearing a ski mask while crouching in the shadows.
But it’s more likely that they are being honest and really see things this way. As Hoffer writes, “The well-adjusted make poor prophets.” That, and “the fanatic is not really a stickler for principal.” Oh, and “Salvation can come to them only from the miraculous, which seeps through a crack in the iron wall of inexorable reality.” To ride on the Trump-o-wheel, you have to see things his way, and a bunch of people trying to game out what to do if Trump continues to discredit democracy is in fact a plot against Trump. George Orwell was an amateur.
The report envisioned much worse than Trump lying about voter fraud. To overturn election results, Trump got Republican state legislatures and governors to send alternate or additional sets of electors, resulting in some states sending two sets of electors to congress as happened in the completely bonkers presidential election of 1876. The Department of Justice sued to stop mail-in ballots from being counted (not completely unlike what happened in Florida in 2000) and deployed federal agents to polling places to prevent fraud. The National Guard was called out to prevent unrest. In two of the four scenarios, both Biden and Trump declared victory on January 20, resulting in the military having to decide who the real commander-in-chief was.
And while I note the historical precedent for such a constitutional crisis in 1876 and 2000, the authors of the Transition Integrity Project note that the nightmare scenarios they imagined began to come true after their group met.
The politicization of the Department of Justice adds an additional worrying dimension, including whether and how the agency could provide legal cover for the President’s actions. In July, the Department of Homeland Security deployed federal agents to Portland, Oregon under questionable legal authority and against the will of local officials. Agents detained people, and used tear gas, rubber bullets and acoustic weapons on protestors. This follows the well-publicized and broadly condemned actions in Lafayette Square in June where National Guard troops and U.S. Park Police used tear gas on protestors in order to allow President Trump to have a photo op in front of a church.
And then, of course, Trump just said that he would not accept an unfavorable election result because of voter fraud that does not exist. I hate how I worry about looking crazy by saying “They’re going to do a coup,” and for evidence I cite Trump saying he won’t accept the election result if it goes against him. I hate how unreasonable I seem by suggesting that we take the President at his word, but here we are.
Much of what the Transition Integrity Project recommends to prevent the subversion of democracy is aimed at government officials, the news media, and other groups and individuals, i.e., the kinds of people who we commonly think of as the adults in the room. (And I know that a few of those adults are in this room, reading this alongside us normal folk. For them, here’s the link to the report. You’ve got some work to do.)
For the rest of us, our job is simple if not easy. Because as the Transition Integrity Project makes clear, if we don’t do our jobs, nothing else will matter. If America is advanced citizenship, the 2020 election is a final exam, and it’s being graded pass-fail. You with me? I know. I’m scared too, but it’s going to be alright.
Here’s how:
First, we need to stop thinking in terms of Election Night. It’s election season. We should get jerseys.
The concept of “election night,” is no longer accurate and indeed is dangerous. We face a period of contestation stretching from the first day a ballot is cast in mid-September until January 20.
Sounds easy enough, though I still have a lot of emotional muscle memory about Election Day. I need to get my head straight, because this “period of contestation” is when the coup — using power to stop votes from being cast or counted — will take place.
Second, we really do need to win big. In the Transition Integrity Project’s war games, the only scenario in which Trump leaves office without inciting widespread violence is when the voters delivered a clear win for Uncle Joey B. As of this writing, Biden has expanded his average lead in national polling into double digits for the first time, and Democrats are building up a bigger advantage in early voting than in 2016, young people are voting in record numbers, women are way out-voting men, and new and infrequent voters are voting at a level that could set a record. After Trump’s Worst Week Ever (Taxes! Debate! COVID! Oh my.), all the arrows are turning to the direction of a big win. “I think it’s Americans trying to save their democracy,” said pollster Cornell Belcher.
Third, we’ve got to take to the streets, because the one thing Biden will have on his side, predicts the Transition Integrity Project, is public opinion.
Approach this as a political battle, not just a legal battle. In the event of electoral contestation, sustained political mobilization will likely be crucial for ensuring transition integrity.
I suspect that a few of you are thinking that public opinion is no match against tanks and Proud Boys. More than a few of you have talked to me about guns, and how we re-enact Red Dawn if things go sideways. An armed resistance to Trumpism, many have argued, is what is called for, not non-violent resistance. The problem with that is that the data says otherwise.
Since 1900, civil resistance has been twice as successful as violent insurgencies against repressive, authoritarian regimes, according to a study published in The MIT Press. And over the last 50 years, civil resistance has become more common and more successful. In fact, some of these are over in a matter of days. The Algiers putsch against French President Charles de Gaulle was turned back after only four days. Now, accomplishing anything in France in four days is commendable, though it probably wasn’t too hard to convince French workers to go on strike. The August Coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991 took only three days. The soldiers realized that following their orders meant driving their tanks over their countrymen. Crowds stopped tanks.
But how big do the crowds have to be? Professor Erica Chenoweth, Ph.D. did some research and found the answer: 3.5%.
No campaigns failed once they’d achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5% of the population—and lots of them succeeded with far less than that. Now, 3.5% is nothing to sneeze at. In the U.S. today, this means almost 11 million people.
Actually, 3.5% of the population of the United States is 11,487,000, but Professor Chenoweth is right about its largeness. That’s roughly equal to the population of Ohio, the number of people who take Alaskan cruises in a decade, and the number of television viewers who the Tampa Bay Buccaneers beat the Los Angeles Chargers last weekend. It seems almost impossible to mobilize that many Americans to protest a coup.
But the number isn’t that big. On January 21, 2017, the Women’s March got as many as 5,246,670 people into the streets. We just need to double that, plus a million or so more. That’s doable. Trump’s presidency began in protest, and it might have to end with one if we’re to restore a government that derives its just powers from the consent of the governed.
It’s tempting to leave it up to the lawyers and politicians, so much faith do we still have in institutions. In 2000, lawyers told Democrats to stop protesting and get behind their convoluted legal strategy, and we ended up with Bush v. Gore. Politicians made deals to resolve the presidential election of 1876, and we got the Compromise of 1877 which installed Rutherford B. Hayes into the White House and ended Reconstruction in the South. Now is not the time to negotiate someone’s freedom for half a loaf of democracy, especially when the flower of our opponents’ incompetence daily blooms anew.
***
Hoffer foresaw, or at least could not rule out, a mass movement like Naziism or Stalinism happening in the United States. “What can be asserted with some plausibility is that in a traditionally free country a Hitler or a Stalin might not find it too difficult to gain power but extremely hard to maintain himself indefinitely.”
Trumpism might have all the king’s lawyers and all the king’s men, but the power shifts if they try to stop a fair election. Doing so would realign narratives, forcing Trump into the castle while the freedom-seeking hoards storm from without. In perhaps in no other society than ours would a coup attempt infuse individual citizens with a heroic narrative. In the United States, democracy is a home game where “the tradition of freedom [is] a tradition of revolt.” Anyone taking to the streets to support democracy is joining not only millions of his or her compatriots but a long tradition of resistance against tyrannous jack wagons.
“In a traditionally free country,” writes Hoffer, “the individual who pits himself against coercion does not feel an isolated atom but one of a mighty race — his rebellious ancestors.”
I never liked it when Michelle Obama said, “When they go low, we go high.” The sentiment always sounded passive and excessively prim. But taking to the streets to restore a democracy displays a more aggressive way of taking the high road that shows, in Hoffer’s words, “unqualified confidence in the future.” We must, he writes, act “as if [we] had already read the book of the future to the last word.”
We know how this story ends. It ends when we’re sitting in the stands at a ballgame with no greater concern than whether the pitcher can throw a strike. This story ends when we’re back at a concert, feeling the ball of joy in our chests spin and grow until we shout and dance with our friends. This story ends not when we get back to normal but when we return to the work of forming a more perfect union.
This story ends when we tell our grandchildren what we did over three days in November.
Sign a pledge to choose democracy here.
As I Was Going Up The Stair, I Met a Campaign That Wasn't There
by Frank Spring
Frank Spring is the authorial equivalent of an actor you’d pay to hear read the phone book. He is the Sam Elliot of letters. If his prose were physical beauty, it would look like Janelle Monae. Today, in “As I Was Going Up The Stair, I Met a Campaign That Wasn't There,” Frank makes an astute and as far as I can tell original observation: Donald Trump is not functionally running a re-election campaign. Frank’s a brilliant thinker, but you’re going to want to read this just for the fun he has with words.
The campaign is now in the more trustworthy hands of Bill Stepien, a man who has both years of professional campaign management experience and also the coronavirus, so as a manager he’s a bit of a mixed bag at this point.
Long Distance in the Time of Corona
by Rachel Megan Barker
Rachel Megan Barker, our highly caffeinated itinerant feminist and political organizer, checks in from quarantine with how her long-distance relationship is going.
I feel like there is a need, if only for my own mental health, for me to add “during a global pandemic” to the end of a lot of thoughts.
Tippecanoe and Agnew Anew
by Jack Hughes
Jack Hughes is back with a look at how the Curse of Tippecanoe heightened the stakes at the vice presidential debate.
Whatever the outcome of the upcoming election, there’s little doubt Kamala Harris and Mike Pence weren’t auditioning for second place or second spot.
Red Ticket: Crime and Punishment
by Robin Whetstone
This weekend in Red Ticket, Robin tells about the time the business manager of the expatriate magazine where I worked started routing our payroll through Cyprus, he said, to avoid taxes. This meant we went a month and a half without getting paid. At that point, I thought it was a good idea, as editor in chief, to lead the newsroom in a strike against our Russian employer, Vladimir Yakovlev, pictured above. God, I was so dumb.
This was fantastic. Jason’s meeting with Yakovlev was the world’s most definitive performance review. If they hadn’t believed our work at the Guardian was worth something, they would have just shot Jason and thrown him in the Moskva River.
RIP
This GOP county chair in Arkansas
This food bank volunteer
This volunteer for the homeless
How we’re getting through it
Inviting elephants to Zoom calls
Finding out how the otter half lives
Eating blueberry lemon breakfast quinoa
What I’m reading
The mainstream media is the voter fraud disinfo super spreader
The story of Octavius Catto should be taught in schools, and I’d watch the heck out of this movie.
What I’m watching
Ann Hornaday says Netflix’s The Forty-Year-Old Version is “a wry love letter to New York, middle-aged angst, creative blockage and artistic survival against daunting odds.” Count me in. She also says to skip Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks, which is a shame.
On a recommendation from S.R., the wife and I motored through Sneaky Pete, the Giovanni Ribisi vehicle about a con man. It was not without its charms until the third season when it went all kinds of off the rails. The third season reminded me of the story arch in Happy Days when the Cunninghams went to California and Fonzie jumped the shark, a historical event that I witnessed, heartbroken at how fake it looked.
What I’m listening to
“Trig” by the Purple Witch of Culver is angry, cool, and jazzhoppy.
Matt Duncan’s cover of the Foo Fighters’ “Everlong” is so good.
Are any of you decluttering your homes? This one guy started digging through a decades-old trove — piles of junk are called “troves” when this happens — of live recordings and found tapes of a 1962 concert Ella Fitzgerald gave in Berlin. Ella: The Lost Berlin Tapes is startlingly bright and clear.
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A new poll shows that Biden and Trump are tied in Texas. Texas is a swing state. Let’s act like it.
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Want a way to send gifts and support local restaurants? Goldbelly’s got you hooked up.
I now offer personal career coaching sessions through Need Hop.
The extent of my political work this election cycle is as the treasurer to a Super PAC with one mission: helping Joe Biden win Texas. If you want to help, here’s how:
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