THE disappointing results in the US mid-term elections from the point of view of popular opposition shouldn’t have been surprising to anyone. The United States is now effectively a one-party state, and seeking redress through elections is no longer a plausible path.
The critical point was already established in the stolen 2020 US Presidential election as the cardinal distinction between ballots and votes.
Whereas votes are linked to specific individuals, and cannot be cast by people who are no longer alive or no longer live in the area, ballots are harvested, potentially months in advance, by party workers mailing out returns to high population density housing projects and retirement homes, and picking them up again.
Because it lacks any practically enforceable safeguards, the ballot system is fundamentally vulnerable to organised fraud. This is why it was adopted and will remain the system going forward.
We are already beyond any question of rigging elections because the electoral system itself is now fundamentally rigged – that is, fundamentally organised to engineer Democratic Party majorities, which is to say rote acclamations of corruption and oligarchy, because the Democrats control high-population urban voting districts.
Where necessary, voter suppression techniques are applied on election day in the form of a shortage of ballots or malfunctioning voting machines, as happened this year in Arizona and elsewhere.
None of this is especially sophisticated – ultimately it represents a 21st century version of 19th century Democrat urban machine politics associated with the infamous Tammany Hall.
It should also be recognised that US democracy was never without fraud. Elections were also sporadically fixed in the 20th century, most notably in Illinois in the 1960 Presidential election, when Richard Daley got out the vote in the graveyards of Chicago to deliver a victory for Kennedy.
Nonetheless, the extent to which the new ballot system represents an electoral new normal is an innovation, and one which it is hard to see being reversed. Additionally the new system is fortified by an increasingly vicious security state, which labels everyone asking the most obvious questions as insurrectionists and election deniers.
American democracy is now caught in the vice of a Catch-22. There is no possibility of achieving political change through elections so long as this system remains in place, and therefore no possibility of changing the electoral system. States that retain local control over the legislature, notably Texas and Florida, may be able to hold the line for the moment, but as things stand national democracy is finished in the United States, and it isn’t coming back.
Just as the triumph of the Nazi Party in Germany would not have been possible had the Weimar Republic been healthy, the fact that the Democrats were able to install this new system in the first place is the result of longer-term trends.
In the short term, one can point to the complicity of the Republican Party especially, but also the failure of Trump, whose fateful decisions in the first weeks of the so-called pandemic set the stage for what history will eventually come to understand, unambiguously, as a coup.
The role of the Republican Party in the US political system will also eventually be clearly perceived. In truth, the GOP represents the inverse of a political party, which instead of aiming to reward its supporters by winning political power, robs them to maintain the personal privileges of its leadership. In the UK, the Conservative Party plays a similar role.
The systematic misallocation of funding made this year by the national Republican leadership reveals the party’s priorities with crystalline clarity. Mitch McConnell, one of the richest men in the Senate, withdrew money from tight races in Arizona, Nevada and Georgia to entrench establishment candidates in Alaska and elsewhere more in tune with his essentially larcenous motives. As the Babylon Bee website noted, the Republican Party staved off a red wave.
Seen from the point of view in which one of them is actually imagined to achieve national office, the current discussions about the relative merits of Trump versus DeSantis in 2024 are either completely delusional, or deliberate distractions.
It is inconceivable that the US administrative state which blocked his victory in 2020, and has spent the last two years viciously persecuting his supporters, would allow Trump to return to the White House in 2024. It’s also true that Trump failed in his first term to prevent the Democrats from seizing the power they have, and unclear what he now could do differently.
Given the position of dominance that the Democrats and their allies in the American Securitate occupy, it also seems highly unlikely DeSantis would be allowed to make meaningful changes. The heart of the matter is that US elections no longer mean anything.
