Political legitimacy is fecund to creative, informed speculation on Hitler's Germany, Mao's China, Putin's Russia, and the undersigned has added his pygmies to this well-populated race. It comes too naturally to many, especially those of the undisciplined Americanoid mutation, to send forth their issue on the topic into political ecosystems, I refer here to democracies, where the young shoots wither and fail for there can be only numbing thought, apodictic, tautological, dead-head thought on the subject of political legitimacy in democracies. It is right there in the glossary, pilgrim, democracies are legitimate because they are output of precisely tabulated will of the people, will of the people being the gold standard of political legitimacy.
It is not therefore efficient usage of pixels or kilobytes, keystrokes or gray matter on "what went wrong" in the 11/8/2016 Catastrophe in America; it is more efficient to explore what very nearly occurred in the Apocalyptic Interregnum, November 3, 2020-January 20, 2021, but even on that latter energy, expended on "what went wrong" is more akin to the energy expended in securing the deck furnishings on RMS Titanic on 5/31/1911. In all three cases an unsinkable man-made structure was suddenly swamped. The creations of man's ingenuity are only as perfect as the materials that go into their construction, in the subject case of this post, a democracy (being by its own definition, legitimate) is only as good as the people who vote. A democratic people may, as they did in Germany in the 1930's, democratically choose a dictator and thereby kill democracy. The credit or fault belongs to the people in a democracy, not to the personages chosen by them as instruments of their will.
By no means do I intend to exempt Adolph Hitler or Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump, the Republican Party, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Mo-that-guy-from-Alabama, et al of their crimes. I do intend with this restatement, as in numerous prior statements, to snatch vigorously away the search light from the hand of the inquisitor and replace it with a looking glass for his better contemplation and comprehension.
It is a matter of verifiable record that the anti-democratic Donald Trump became president of the United States with a minority 46.1% share of the popular vote, -2.7M in the raw vote total; that he received 63M individual votes in 2016, and a clear 304 vote majority in the Electoral College; that the aforesaid Trump was soundly rejected in 2020 by a popular vote margin of 4.5%, -7M in the raw vote total, received only 232 of 538 Electoral votes, while nonetheless garnering a stunning 74.2M individual votes, a record--no other close--for a Loser; and that he stole the first and attempted a coup d'etat in the second to frustrate the will of the people. Yes, he did so with dezinformatsiya and the Big Lie procured from, and furnished to him by, the Russian Federation from its well-stocked anti-democracy toolbox; yes, those tools disoriented the American public, but that last speaks to the lack of quality of the American mind, no? It is true that that mind from the nation's birth has been plagued by mental disease or defect, often with attendant violence, which renders it vulnerable to delirium from the oil of different snakes: Christianity, Protestantism particularly, folk medicine, demagoguery from pulpit or soap box, anti-intellectualism, folk wisdom; that its deficiencies have made susceptible to Great Awakenings which come only to those in permanent slumber. Yes, all of that is true. That is the point, Bunky. It's the quality-of-mind thing. One must allow however that it is also true that in all of her history the American voter had somehow overcome these native disadvantages and, combined with her fellows, behaved as in the eminent political scientist V.O. Key, Jr.'s term, The Responsible Electorate, rational and self-interested, swatting away -isms of left and right with alacrity, evincing a quotidian community morality, goodness, empathy, common sense. Never elected a fascist.
The temptation thus to render verdict on 2016 and 2020 as a one-off...as two-offs. Precisely 74,223,744 pieces of evidence can be lifted onto the scales of justice to sway that verdict. There is no such thing as a "two-off." True, it seems that number is surely less and falling after the little upset of 1/6/2021. True, he is really, most sincerely gone and is permanently muted by his fave disinformation signals. But the point here, again, is not him, not even him and the McEnany's and Kellyanne Conway's and Limbaugh's and Cruz's and Josh's and Mo's, the enablers, the point is that their snake oil could not be sold, could not be consumed, without those 74,223,744 imbibers. It is them, 46.9% of us. Therefore,
Send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
