Part One:
We speak with Mark Joseph Stern, legal writer at Slate.com, about his latest article: “How Trump Could Steal the Election — One Increasingly Likely Scenario Where Everything Goes Wrong.” It involves an election-night sabotaging of the mail-in votes. The scary thing about this scenario is that we can absolutely visualize all of these events happening, based on what Pres. Trump has said and what he has done during his presidency.
What if it is mostly Republican voters who cast their ballots in-person in November? That’s not unlikely. Many of Trump’s supporters, following the president’s lead, have pooh-poohed the risks of COVID-19. Like their leader, they refuse to follow the protective recommendations of public health experts. Democratic voters, on the other hand, are more likely to comply with medical advice and do everything they can to vote safely, i.e., wearing masks, social distancing, washing hands, and voting by absentee ballot rather than appearing physically at the polls.
Under these circumstances, on election day, the in-person, machine-counted votes – disproportionately Republican votes – will be counted first, with results known just a few hours after the polls close. In contrast, it may take a good deal more time to finish counting the absentee ballots – preponderantly Democratic – which election officials usually save for last and which may need to wait even longer this year if the Postal Service continues to be undermined by the Trump Administration.
It would not be surprising, then, for Pres. Trump to proclaim himself the winner on election night. He could say he is ahead based on the early returns (from in-person voters). And Trump could declare that the absentee ballots should be ignored because he believes they are fraudulent.
You might ask why the country would agree to let Trump himself make the decision as to who wins. The answer is in the US Constitution. The members of the Electoral College – where the presidential winner is decided in December – are chosen by each individual state’s *legislature*. Those legislators are not required to follow the will of the people (although morally they should). And the legislatures in three important battleground states – Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, which made the difference in 2016 – are controlled by Republicans.
Would Republican-controlled legislatures actually play along with Trump’s plan to “win” regardless of the voters? Well, look what happened in the Wisconsin primaries a few months ago. The Democratic governor and his administration declared a set of administrative rules for how the absentee ballots should be handled, the Republican legislature said something different, and the courts overruled the governor, voiding thousands of Democratic absentee ballots.
And if Trump “wins” in a similar fashion in November, how do you think the US Supreme Court will rule? Can you say “Bush v. Gore”?
Part Two:
We speak with Jonathan Malesik – professor and author of two fascinating articles: “Drinking Alone” (in Commonweal) and “Imagining a Better Life After the Coronavirus” (in The New Republic). The first discusses his experiences teaching in Wilkes-Barre, PA, a small isolated city that once was a flourishing producer of anthracite coal. Like many similar towns, Wilkes-Barre is but a shell of its old self. Every one of its residents who had the ability to leave has done so. Those who remain are often, like the city itself, depressed, frightened, and wondering if they’ll survive.
Many residents spend a lot of time at bars, drinking. Even there, even when folks are laughing and telling stories, most of them are lonely to their cores. Especially for an outsider who did not grow up in the community, being accepted is difficult. And then there’s the cultural barriers between the elite/ educated college people and the regular working class folks living close to the economic margins.
Malesik’s second article ponders the meaning and purpose of life. More than 100 years ago, Max Weber wrote about the Protestant work ethic which underlies American capitalism. While taking responsibility and working hard are generally admirable values, have we Americans chosen an unhealthy life balance? Europeans are successful capitalists too, but they don’t seem as driven as Americans; they have chosen to take more time to oneself or with one’s family, whereas Americans seem most often to make the choice to earn more money and own more possessions.
The current pandemic, for all its deleterious effects on human beings and their ability to support their families, perhaps it has given us a little more time to reflect on some of the choices we’ve been making. Maybe we can even tweak the balance in our lives.
