Following on growing more protective of language is part one. Part two is keeping in front of us why it’s important.Words and the concepts that they represent show how we interpret the world, and in to that degree, are themselves the world. But if you go around saying that “up is down”, “black is white”, and “solids don’t exist”, you are operating on levels of semantic confusion and while metaphysically interesting, these are not factual statements. They are not, in this world, true.
I am not interested here in assertions that words are merely labels and are not the things themselves. I am not interested in being told that solids do not, ultimately exist. I am very invested, as we all should be, in stating the case that the world exists as a shared reality, a constellation of relationships between people navigating a very real, experienced container of objects and events that we call “world.”
Following from that are natural iaws discovered by science via replicable experiment. This is how we arrive at a general consensus that an event or process is what it is and does what it does. These experiments help us describe the world we inhabit. Yes, we discover principles over time that alter how we describe the world, that change how the world appears to us, but the throughlne is that people share an experience of gravity at a very local level that operates across the planet in the same, expected way. Knowing that matter is actually a matter of density of energy comprised of sub-atomic events within which quantum mechanics maintains the world as we encounter it is beautiful and fascinating; but a brick falling on your head is still going to hurt and inflict damage.
Similarly, when a person in the world takes money from those in need allocated specifically to meet the challenges they face without just cause or oversight, people get upset A government may change the rules so that this is “legal”, but people are within their rights to say that it’s theft. We may have had a political order based on the structure of a union of states whose voters elect representatives who are supposed to represent their interests and ensure the integrity of the polity. Many votes are cast in good faith that the elected representatives will represent their constituents’ interests. The election is a fact. It is vetted and there are winners and losers.
Before the current occupier’s first term in the halls of power, it was conceded by many that the United States had the most reliable elections of any democracy. The first time in the twenty-first century this was called into question was in the 2000 elections when there were charges of missing votes, and “hanging chads” in Florida. The election was narrow. The Democratic candidate, Al Gore, former vice-president under Bill Clinton, conceded defeat to George W Bush. He did this so as not to drag the country into a drawn-out process that might prove more divisive and hurtful than helpful. The result was the disaster of eight years of the second Bush administration.
The point is that between Bush and the current occupier’s first term, the nation had two national elections and myriad other state and local elections and no results, that I know of, were contested, and despite the blustering that President Barack Obama wasn’t an American citizen, there were no improprieties at the national, let alone state and local levels. The certification of elections by the states hasn’t been terribly controversial until the 2020 election.
To understand the certification process, please see the Appendix following this entry.
In 2020, we see the beginning of the Big Lie when a Republican in Michigan’s largest county refused to certify the results of the Presidential election by abstaining. There were still enough votes to obtain certification but consider how the idea that the election was rigged had gained traction with members of Congress by January of 2021. "Republicans objected to results in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Only the objections to Arizona (which was interrupted by the violent insurrection on the Capitol) and Pennsylvania were supported by senators and went to a vote. In total, 147 Republicans objected to the results in those two states.” (1)
The claims were baseless and easily disproved, but this is an example of how refusing to acknowledge truth leads to catastrophe. Four years later, we are in the middle of a transition to a government ruled by oligarchs instead of elected leaders, who have abdicated their responsibility to the Constitution and the laws of the land. We live in a country where I am adding commentary to book titled “On Tyranny” because truth has been discarded.
So why should we “believe truth” when the rulers do not? Why cling to it at all when the regime has placed itself above truth and the rule of law? Quite simply, because it is the only damned thing that’s going to get us through all this.
You cannot win an argument with an ignoramus. That’s not the point; the ignoramus will wear you down and eventually, even if you’re discussing simple arithmetic, may well say he doesn’t believe 2 + 2 = 4. You can say “fine” and let him try to get through life not understanding how prices work and paying for goods is based on that reality.
Unfortunately, there are many in this country for whom truth doesn’t matter, for whom facts are what they make up for a press release, or a tweet. There are many who believe in the falsehoods, the lies, and to the degree that this has happened and is happening still, our reality has become considerably darker.
But if we give up facts, if we give up on truth — and here, what I mean by these terms is that facts apply to physical, observable events that lead to a shared reality, and the truth might be considered the principles the stand behind the whole process of understanding those events for a common, verifiable result — we surrender that consensus, we lose the shared experience of the process of moving toward a more desirable destination for all, as we may assume a country and its citizens would like to do. All of that is quite frankly, starkly, gone.
Snyder, of course, puts it better. “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pas for the most blinding lights.”
Another term that has arose in the past couple of decades is “post-truth”; this is another malignant tumor that grew out of the dissembling of the Republican Party. This follows very much along the lines of what Susskind was told; that the regime (at the time, this was the second Bush administration) was creating its own reality and the “reality-based community” would be left behind, if not out of the conversation completely.
“You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear n and what is actually the case. This renunciation can feel natural and pleasant, but the result is your demise as an individual — and thus the collapse of any political system that depends on individualism.”
Snyder describes how “truth dies in four modes.”
The first is “open hostility to verifiable reality”; this is comprised of “presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts.” The current occupier of the White House’s tally of lies during his first term resulted in a “figure so high that it makes the correct assertions seem like unintended oversights on the path to total fiction”, eventually reaching its apotheosis in the Big Lie, “creating a fictional counterworld.”
Next is “shamanistic incantation.” Here we encounter the “endless repetition” fo the fascist style of rendering others into stereotypes by zeroing in on character traits of individuals and repeating them so that the fictional becomes plausible. Followers will swallow repeated lies because they do not “want to believe that they could be deceived on such scale and take comfort in the repetition”, particular regarding the insurrection. They were told the election was stolen from their Leader and they supported that, violently.
Snyder points to the term “sleepy Joe” as an example of how an elected leader could be rendered into a type rather than a human being; the internalization of this reductionist description is easier than grappling with the complexities and nuances of a political leader who had served his constituents at the state level and the country at the federal level into dotard, a dotard who had stolen an election. That doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it tracks with the occupier and his acolytes.
The third mode is “magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction.” To be sure, we live in a world of contradicting forces, ideas, and philosophies, but what Snyder posits here is more concrete. “A billionaire can pay neither taxes nor debts. Liberating the wealthy from taxes will not increase the national debt. Fighting corruption means selling the presidency for favors. A disease which kills hundreds of thousands will vanish. The winner gets fewer votes.” And so on.
What Snyder makes plain is that this is very much “a blatant abandonment of reason.” He cites a story from Victor Klemperer as an example of this when, in 1932, a student of Klemperer’s told him he should just give himself over to Fuhrer, to Hitler and put aside everything else. At the end of the war, after all the devastation and the atrocities, when Klemperer met an amputee who had told him that he still believed in Hitler.
We see the same thing playing out repeatedly by diehards who cannot seem to see the occupier as anything but a near-divine figure. Despite seeing for themselves the confusion and catastrophe unfolding and despite themselves bearing the brunt of policies already enacted, many still support the current occupier of the White House.
At this point, it would not be too difficult to point out that the abdication of reason and acceptance of falsehood-as-reality is a psychological aberration, one that can relatively easily be inculcated on a mass level.
The final mode is “misplaced faith”, something very much that follows from magical thinking but is motivated by the positioning of the leader as a divine or superhuman being. Repeatedly, the current occupier has said that he is the people’s “retribution” and that he alone can fix all that’s wrong with the country. “When faith descends from. Heaven to earth int his way, no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience.”
Snyder points out that Klemperer was terrified that the acceptance of this mode had become permanent. “Once truth becomes oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant.”
Snyder looks to Eugene Ionesco, the playwright whose work Rhinoceros is. a towering play of the post-war era. Those who fall prey to it are transformed into, well, rhinoceroses. He quotes Ionesco discussing his own experiences of how “University professors, students, intellectuals were turning Nazi…At the beginning, they certainly weren’t Nazis.” Ionesco talked of how a group of fifteen would get together and “try to find arguments opposing theirs.” The chilling part is this: “From time to time, one of our friends said: ‘Idon’t agree with them, to be sure, but on certain points, nevertheless, I must admit, for example, the Jews…’ etc. And this was a symptom.(emphasis mine — JB) Three weeks later, this person would become a Nazi…Towards the end, only three or four of us were still resisting.”
As Snyder points out, Ionesco hoped to show people how pervasive propaganda is and how “bizarre”, in the sense that it succeeds against all reason. Snyder again: “Fascists despised the small truths of daily existence, loved slogans that resonated like a new religion, and preferred creative myths to history or journalism.” He points out how they used the new technology of radio to disseminate their propaganda (and later, I might add, film) and in such a way that the people were bombarded with these messages before they had time to critically assess the messages or examine the facts.
Again, we have echoes in the present on all these points. Since we are now well into the transition, though fights are already going in various courts, what can we do? I think Snyder’s chapter heading says it all; “believe truth.”
What this implies to me, is to stay well-informed, rely on your own words to convey facts and truth, particularly to those who are shaken or wavering in their resolve or sense of reality. It’s so easy to be overwhelmed right now, but counterintuitively, the best thing to do is to break away from doom-scrolling or even spending inordinate amounts of time doing research. Connect with others, offer support, be present.
“Believing truth” sounds like an odd thing to say, especially if as many of us do, verify and accept facts, truth. But we are at a point where facts are objects of belief and denial for many.
“Post-truth is pre-fascism.”
Appendix
Election administration in the United States is highly decentralized; each state has different rules for whether local election administration is handled at the county, city or town level and whether elections are run by a single individual, board of commissioners or a combination of the two. There are more than 10,000 election administration jurisdictions in the U.S., ranging from small towns with a few hundred registered voters to Los Angeles County with over 5.6 million registered voters.
Consequently, the local officials who handle the day-to-day operations of elections are also the first juncture in the post-election process. After the polls close, local election officials are responsible for counting ballots, including mail-in ballots (in some states, mail-in ballots are accepted several days after Election Day if postmarked beforehand). Officials then process provisional ballots and conduct a “canvass” — the tabulating, double-checking and transmitting of the results from the local jurisdiction to the state.
Next, the certification of election results is conducted at the state level, either by a state board of elections or the state’s chief elections officer (in 47 states, that’s the secretary of state). While the canvass counts and confirms the ballots cast, the certification finalizes the results based on the canvass. The exact procedures and deadlines vary by state, but the election officials, secretary of state or governor must sign a certificate of election in the case of U.S. House or Senate results and a certificate of ascertainment for presidential results.
In the U.S., voters select their president and vice president indirectly through the Electoral College. To win the presidency, a candidate is not elected by popular vote, but by receiving at least 270 out of the 538 electoral votes. When the founding fathers wrote the U.S. Constitution, they selected the Electoral College as a compromise — a balance between being elected by popular vote and being elected by Congress. These members of the political elite were concerned about uneducated masses swaying the results and small states being overlooked. Consequently, Article II of the U.S. Constitution (and later 12th and 23rd Amendments, plus the Electoral Count Act (ECA) of 1887) established the Electoral College and outlines what happens between Election Day and the presidential inauguration:
- After states certify their election results, they appoint electors according to those results.
- The electors meet mid-December in their respective states and send their certificates of ascertainment to several federal governing bodies. However, states must settle any questions or contests at least six days before this meeting of electors — this so-called “safe harbor” deadline was a crucial component in Bush v. Gore (2000).
- Congress meets in a joint session to count the electoral votes — a routine procedure in past years that the country gave more focus to in 2021. This takes place on Jan. 6.
Additionally, the electoral college is a “winner-take-all” system, meaning that whichever candidate wins the majority or plurality of the state popular vote, even if by the smallest of margins, they win all of the electoral votes (the exceptions are Maine and Nebraska, who divide their electoral votes by congressional district). The number of electoral votes allocated to each state is dependent on population size and is equal to a number of senators (two) plus House representatives. Washington, D.C. also gets three electors despite having no voting representation in Congress. Each state has a different process for selecting electors, but they are typically lawmakers or activists with ties to the state Democratic or Republican parties.
In 1876, the trajectory of post-Civil War Reconstruction hinged on the disputed presidential election results between Rutherford Hayes and Samuel Tilden. Hayes prevailed, but the constitutional crisis prompted lawmakers to spend the next decade devising a law, the 1887 ECA, that outlined Congress’ procedures for election certification.
The ECA prepares for two potential scenarios — first, if two or more sets of electors are sent from one state (this is what occurred with four states in 1876) or second, if only one set of electors is sent but objections are raised that votes were not “regularly given” or an elector not “lawfully certified.” If an objection is made in writing by at least one senator and one representative, the joint session is suspended while the two chambers meet separately for a maximum of two hours of debate. Then, a majority vote is taken to accept or reject the objection.
Note: I recommend reading the entire piece as it also discusses the impediments to the process that have brought us to this moment.
You can find the entire piece here: https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/after-election-day-the-basics-of-election-certification/
Bibliography
Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny - Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Crown Publishing. New York. 2017..
I don’t have to add a lot here in terms of what we will likely be called on to do. You will read, again and again, how important it is to contact your reps, to volunteer your time, to march in protest, and to help where you can/as you can.
Two places to start with:
Mobilize at https://www.mobilize.us/. I have the landing page set to my area; populated with events, petitions, and volunteer opportunities, it’s practically one-stop shopping.
Indivisible at https://indivisible.org/ is another comprehensive hub. You can sign up for updates, download their guide to organizaing, find candidates to support, and more.
If you don't have a copy of "On Tyranny", you can purchase one here:
"On Tyranny" at Timothy Snyder's website where he lists several options. Support local bookstores and buy local or check it out from your local library. Navigation
Chapter 10
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Afterword(s)
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